I already had lowered expectations, but... uh, yeah

Haven't watched it just yet, but at least now I know to get good and sloshed first.

78 comments

At least it's following the "every other" rule for Star Trek Movies. Final Frontier was awful. Undiscovered County was great. Generations has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 47 while First Contact is at 93. See my table below. Now that we've gotten a bad one out of the way, I'd watch four to six movies with the SNW Crew.

Film	Year	RT Rating
Motion Picture	1979	52
Wrath of Khan	1982	86
Search for Spock	1984	79
Voyage Home	1986	81
Final Frontier	1989	23
Undiscovered County	1991	83
Generations	1994	47
First Contact	1996	93
Insurrection	1998	55
Galaxy Quest	1999	90
Nemesis	2002	38
Star Trek	2009	94
Into Darkness	2013	84
Beyond	2016	86
Section 31	2025	24

Thanks for including Galaxy Quest.
- Why is it included?

I'll say it.
In spite of everything we saw in Discovery, Michelle Yeoh was always a delight, no matter which character she played
If we got more of her, regardless of the rest, I'll enjoy it
- Michelle Yeoh is clearly not the problem.
  
  If anything, Section 31 suffered from not enough Michelle Yeoh.
- Michelle Yeoh was always a delight
  I never understood the love for her Star Trek characters. It seems that people who hated Discovery at least complimented the Emperor Georgiou character as a high point. She is far from bad, but I just don't get it.
  
  I didn't like her character ("mwahaha I'm so evil and smart, I'm such a villain, aren't I?") up until we had the episode where she was sent back to the mirror universe and she became repulsed by having Kelpian slaves/eating them, and, well, her old life in general.
  Up until that point she thought seeing the prime universe hadn't changed her. She thought prime universe humanity was weak because it sought power through cooperation rather than cementing themselves as the one absolute power. Going back and seeing her universe again through a different lense completely shattered her previously-held perceptions and beliefs. It suddenly dawned on her that she was wrong all along, and was ready to admit it and to make a change in her life.
  Finally we had some depth to her (I'm sorry, "I'm evil but I love Michael Burnham because she's the flawless main character" is not character depth), but then they ended her story.
  
  i wish we got to spend more time with Captain Georgiou. she saw potential in Michael when no one else did, but didn't see the disrepency between what she was and could be. she paid the ultimate price for making her the xo, and it arguably led to a quadrant wide war. that's interesting! the Emperor always felt to me like an excuse to reuse an actor and just came across like more noise in a season that already had too many anttagonists.
- Add the Amanda Plummer as Vadic. Those are some phenomenal performances.
  
  Wait is Vadic in this? I would watch it just for her.
  
  I wasn't a fan; she kept chewing the scenery so much it was almost like the plot had to pause every time she started another soliloquy
- She was one of only three seasons I continued to watch the garbage pile that was Discovery. But this was easily the worst I've gotten from her character. Not because of her acting. Her character just seemed watered down in this movie.

- RIP random Romulan.
  
  But Ro, no problem.
- Stargate has always been streets ahead.
- my headcanon:
  gravity wells and other such 'inertial fields' are trans-phasic. You don't fall through the floor because it's not the floor being solid that holds you there, it's the inertial field of the grav-plating bleeding into higher dimensions and back down into parallel phases of the causal volume.
  inertial dampening fields do the same thing, which is why the habitation space within the ship isn't instantly pancaked to the back wall under full impulse propulsion. When the ship is moving under normal circumstances, the interior does not experience any acceleration so long as the inertial dampening fields are not being overpowered by excessive maneuvering.
  
  A perfectly cromulent explanation. Now, as to why the character is still able to breathe, despite their lungs being phased relative to the ordinary air molecules on the ship...
- "As you know, for reasons we don't fully understand, ghosts can stand on a floor, but we go right through a wall."

Star Trek Discovery was so bad I had to just stop in the second last season... and I was only playing it as background noise at that point! I guess I'll try this movie but if even Michelle Yeoh can't save it I'm going back to old 1990s episodes...
Update: I got through it but holy shit... It had some good moments and other bits that felt like a Red Alert cut scene...
- As of this comment, about 20ish minutes in. Yeoh can hold her own whilst maintaining the established character from DISCO.
  I wouldn't let that show's performance discourage viewing other modern Trek. Lower Decks and Prodigy each have their strengths. The latter having a slightly more serious tone and requiring less accumulated knowledge of the series as a whole.
  
  Don't forget strange new worlds!
  
  One problem I had with the movie is that they underutilized Michelle Yeoh
  
  I was so pleasantly suprised by how good Prodigy season 1 was. Session 2 was meh...

I mean... From the very first article written about the rough idea of the movie we all knew it was going to be trash, and certainly not anything deserving of the name "Star Trek".
The moment the first trailer dropped a couple of years after that, I personally knew this movie wouldn't even be worth pirating.
The effort I'd spend on finding a pirate source, and the time I'd waste watching this, are far too valuable.

I would not recommend watching it sloshed. That combination would just put me to sleep.
It’s a terribly simple MacGuffin-chasing plot, yet somehow feels weighed down by exposition. All of the characters are super flat and under developed. It’s not bad in any entertaining way, it’s just boring.
There was a lot of talk around here before hand about whether Section 31 should ever be used as protagonists, or if that represents a betrayal of the principles behind Star Trek. This movie was not worth that level of discussion. It doesn’t raise any murky moral quandaries or even really glorify the idea of an anything-goes type secret organization. This could just as easily have been an on-the-books Starfleet team - apart from the fact that they didn’t seem all that competent. The concept implies a darker version of a Mission Impossible team, but what was delivered was a bunch of goofballs more in line with Guardians of the Galaxy.
Pluses:
Michelle Yeoh does a great job with what she’s given. That’s not much, but she’s fun to watch as always.
The woman who plays young Rachel Garrett does a good job - she has some of the cringiest dialogue in this, but she delivers it well. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of her in this role, though that seems very unlikely at this point.
The action is executed well enough, and the effects are all very pretty. It doesn’t mean much without a compelling story behind it, but it’s still worth saying.
The idea of a microscopic character is interesting, and they used it in some fun ways. The character himself was awfully annoying, though!
- they didn’t seem all that competent
  That would be bad enough for a Starfleet team, but being part of the incredibly secret and elite Section 31? And as their "alpha team"? It just doesn't make sense.
  The woman who plays young Rachel Garrett does a good job
  Why would Starfleet even send someone to supervise the team on their behalf?! That really does not go with how Section 31 had been shown to function. There should be nearly nobody that even knows Section 31 exists in the fist place, let alone some random junior science officer.
  the effects are all very pretty
  I thought the shapeshifter's visual effect was neat. Especially compared to the DS9 changeling effect.
  
  That would be bad enough for a Starfleet team, but being part of the incredibly secret and elite Section 31? And as their "alpha team"? It just doesn't make sense.
  Torchwood & agents of SHIELD
- The editing was also really jarring. Constant cuts to really tight close ups of characters who haven't been introduced to the audience. And the fight scenes were somehow too shakey and too slow.
  As someone who's studied extensively at the Gizmonic Institute of Deep Hurting, it's just not a very good movie.
- Haven't watched yet but its funny to me the idea that the Federation with their lofty principles still has a secret police -- but its actually a make work program for all the incurable psychopaths in the galaxy that resembles a black ops wetworks deep cover operations in every way, except you give them "very important and secret missions" just chasing each other around the edges of the galaxy to keep them away from the rest of the federation
  
  I love it - much more consistent with Star Trek concepts than whatever it is they’ve been going for. I could almost see Lower Decks sneaking an idea like that in if they were still around.

People just love to hate. It's not that bad.

Look at it this way. A lot of the memes that get made are from the absolute worst episodes. This entire movie is going to be prime meme fodder.
- Me feeling like Data in S3 of Picard:
- @remindme@mstdn.social 3 months Section 31 memes are fair game

It's alright. Didn't really feel like a star trek movie but I really like Georgiou. Also it seemed really rushed.
Edit: Also I just remembered. Rachel's cameo seemed kind of fan service-y. There was no reason for her to be there.
- Also it seemed really rushed.
  It does seem like it was entirely written and shot as a TV series, and was only reworked as a feature length film during editing.
  
  I sincerely believed it to be a series or miniseries at least. Hearing it was a movie was very surprising to me.
  
  Because it was. Was originally supposed to be a multiple episode series. It's rushed because it's highly compressed.

I was already unmotivated because I don't love Section 31 (conceptionally) in Trek that much and Discovery is the one series I struggle to get though...
Really my singular reason to watch it is that Michell Yeoh is awesome

Star Trek: Section 31
..... CIA in space
- Edit: direct re-upload since catbox is down
  
  I still stand by my theory that Ms. Piggy is Q.
  
  CIA Pigs In Space!!! .... starring Foster Dulles and his younger sister Allison Dulles
  
  ... btw ... I always loved the Muppet Show and 'Pigs In Space' .... Waldorf and Statler calling from the balcony 'YOU CALL THAT ACTING!!'
- Only the best space crack
  
  They would be the type to help the Dominion sell ketracel white to the Klingons and take a cut of the profits in order to finance a secret war with the ~~Marquis~~ Maquis.
  In real life, the CIA worked with the Columbian cartels to sell cocaine in the US, so that the government organization could finance a secret war in Nicaragua ... the whole operation is believed to have flooded the US with cocaine in the 1980s and created the Crack epidemic of that decade.
  Look up Gary Webb to read about this important bit of history.

Oof. I haven’t read anything about it; I’ve only seen commercials. I was hoping it would at least be tolerable. Oh well.
- ...from getting properly drunk enough to find some kind of enjoyment in it.
  
  Fuck you, now I have to rewatch Firefly again.