Star Trek: Section 31 - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray SteelBook

Suppose you’re wondering when a franchise film is no longer part of a franchise. That’s like asking when an egg is no longer an egg. You can scramble up the egg, add some tasty ingredients, and turn it into a souffle, but essentially it’s still an egg, it just looks and tastes better now. But to make a souffle you need to have skill, you shouldn't overwork your ingredients, and you also need to get that SOB out of the oven before it burns, but not too early so it doesn’t flop. 

At the end of this foodie-inspired metaphor, we have the frequently burnt, flopped souffle of Star Trek. A franchise that is so desperate trying find an identity for a new generation of fans that it now routinely alienates the people who stuck by it through thick and thin. For every season of something grand like Brave New Worlds or the humorous Lower Decks, there are the last three seasons of Discovery or the woeful first two seasons of Picard. Now we have Star Trek: Section 31, an ill-conceived, poorly executed, irritatingly bland, and offensively stupid addition to the Trek universe. 

After murdering her family as a teenager and becoming an interplanetary genocidal force unlike anything the galaxy has ever seen, Emperor Philippa Georgiou AKA Madame du Franc (Michelle Yeoh) looks to go straight. Leaving the Mirror Universe and joining the Prime Universe, her fresh start is in the service of the Galaxy. Joining Starfleet’s covert agency Section 31, Georgiou and her misfit team is tasked by Control (Jamie Lee Curtis) to recover a deadly weapon called “Godsend” (I guess because it kills you and sends you to meet God?). As Georgiou attempts to salvage her own life she must confront the sins of her past when a mysterious masked individual seizes control of the weapon. 

As a spinoff of Discovery, I really shouldn’t have been surprised by Section 31, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad. Series director Olatunde Osunsanmi helms this excursion with the same blunt hand he used on any of the fourteen episodes of Discovery he directed. But even blunt, his Discovery episodes were at least somewhat watchable. This one, not so much. Star Trek has always been a series about big ideas that don’t always have a direct clear solution. It’s why the Kobayashi Maru theme is so prevalent throughout the franchise and it’s an idea that requires a deft hand capable of finessing the thematic gray areas. 

But, Section 31 is not capable of finesse. It’s a blunt, irritating, tool. It’s as if someone took Zack Snyder’s R-rated Rebel Moon films and stuffed them down the PG-13 gullet of Eli Roth’s Borderlands adaptation creating a vomitous foie gras of bad ideas and drizzled them in the trappings of the Star Trek universe. There you go, some more food metaphors to deliver the point that this is a terrible, cheap imitation of what once made Star Trek great. 

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 
After its run on Paramout+, Star Trek: Section 31 beams into home video for a two-disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray + Digital release complete with SteelBook packaging. The 4K is pressed on a BD66 disc with a BD50 serving the film in 1080p. The discs load to animated main menus with standard navigation options. The SteelBook is a stylish piece that gives Michelle Yeoh the main stage on the front with an elegant inside image.

Credit where credit is due, Star Trek: Section 31 arrives with a robust Dolby Vision transfer. Keeping with the blooming lights and deep grimy shadows that are so prevalent in modern Trek these days, the image certainly makes the most of the visuals. Fine details for facial features and the practical makeup and costumes look great and are a nice visual highlight. The HDR grade gives the colors plenty of space to pop out nicely and those dark shadows and black spaces lend to some healthy image depth. My step-back moment for this transfer comes at the hands of all the CGI tomfoolery. Obviously, big visual effects sequences like space battles and the like rely on some VFX enhancements, but there are times when it’s used to spice up an otherwise go-nowhere scene and it looks out of place and flattens the image. When Philippa Georgiou is meeting the Section 31 team is a standout where there’s so much image manipulation it just looks ghastly. Artificial snap zoom-ins and zoom-outs. Strange cutaways to characters that aren’t even in the same room, weird floating lighting anomalies, it’s just a strange visual choice that doesn’t do this transfer any favors. Now the whole film isn’t like this, but a lot of it is and it’s enough of a distraction that the image never settles down long enough that you can appreciate whatever it is you’re looking at. And then, I hope the next Star Trek film invests in some light bulbs. I get it Section 31 is supposed to work in the shadows of the Federation but does it have to be in literal shadows at all times? The swirling whirling track lighting and glowing panels ain't cutting it. 

Fairing a bit better than the visuals is the Dolby Atmos audio mix. GIven the amount of constant activity, it’s not much of a surprise the channel spread through the soundscape is just as effective. There’s a lot of zip-quick swirly-whirly camera pans and visual shenanigans that the audio imaging follows the effort. Plenty of side, rear, and height activity to go around. Dialog is strong and clean, even if you wish some characters would shut the hell up, you can hear them loud and clear. Jamie Lee Curtis’ voice as Control for the mission briefings is like a booming voice from God in those moments. The pew-pew laser-blasting action sequences get plenty of attention and there’s a healthy appreciable amount of LFE for big explosions and impact points. All around, a solid mix… just for a really crappy movie.

On the side of bonus features, there is a pretty decent collection of materials. Between the various featurettes, it’s clear that this project was made with the best intentions, where it goes off the rails I couldn’t tell you. But the various featurettes are nicely dedicated topics. 

• Alpha Squad (HD 26:26)
• Stunts Squad (HD 12:49)
• Art Squad (HD 11:08)
• Gear Squad (HD 11:37)
• Georgiou (HD 15:22)
• Gag Reel (HD 4:16)

I go to movies because I want to enjoy something. I don’t go with knives out aiming to eviscerate a new flick regardless of genre or franchise. Likewise, I tread into any new Star Trek venture hoping for something thoughtful and grand. I don’t expect DS9-level perfection right out of the gate. The first couple of episodes of Discovery were certainly out there, but it was all right. It started well and had room to grow. Unfortunately, the quality slide was precariously accelerated after the third season. The return of Michelle Yeoh as Georgiou was a long time coming, but it should have been in a form better than Star Trek: Section 31. An Oscar-winning legendary actress like Yeoh deserved a better film for her solo Trek effort.

The best I can say is that at 95 minutes is that it's short. And because it came to streaming, you could bounce out any time you wanted. I got through it, I gave it its due, and I thought it was pretty damned terrible. Star Trek has endured some pretty low moments over the last six decades. There have been many bad episodes, bad series, and bad films. Section 31 is rock bottom for this franchise to the point that it doesn’t even resemble Star Trek anymore. It’s something else and it’s not good. Hopefully, Season 3 of Strange New Worlds (whenever it airs) will be the soothing balm fans need after this film. On 4K UHD, Section 31 looks fine, sounds great, and there are over an hour of decent extra features to digest. But I can’t recommend a technically good disc when the movie itself is this bad. Truly - Skip It. If you’re curious, stream it.