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Scott Hardie: “It sucked.”
Woof. Early reaction from Star Trek fans has been harshly negative, but Star Trek fans hate pretty much anything that is not a rerun of "Darmok." When critics came out against this too, my hopes against-all-odds that it might somehow have been good (or at least fun) were dashed. This misbegotten movie should never have existed.
For the uninitiated: After a long hiatus, Star Trek returned to TV in 2017 with Discovery, a show that was intended to be a limited series with a definitive ending, but that CBS/Paramount decided to extend into an ongoing series that required extensive renovations in its middle seasons to justify certain characters continuing to have adventures who were never meant to last that long. An especially blatant case was Michelle Yeoh's Philippa Georgiou, a Starfleet captain killed in the pilot episode who returns later as the evil Mirror Universe version of herself (thankfully sans goatee) where she rules as a galactic emperor who has mass-exterminated billions of people to stay in power. This "Space Hitler," as my wife Kelly calls her, survives the original run of episodes, so the show had to justify her continuing to hang around on a Starfleet ship having Starfleet adventures, which could not have been interesting to a character who was accustomed to committing planetary genocides for funsies, not to mention an internationally-celebrated actress with a long movie career. The character was given a half-developed subplot about being recruited by spy agency Section 31 before being written out of the series with a time-travel episode that sent her back to the original time period where Discovery started (long story), with the hopes of developing a "Section 31" TV series to star Yeoh. The pandemic, the guild strikes, and Yeoh's career resurgence made that prospect impossible, and so the already-written premiere episode was retrofitted into a standalone film and produced as a one-off project that mostly ignores the titular spy agency in favor of a rushed heist story that recasts Yeoh as regretful about her past actions—you remember, that whole extermination of billions of people. So to recap: A profoundly evil character from a limited TV series was retrofitted into an anti-hero on an ongoing series before being spun off into her own ill-fated TV series that was retrofitted into a movie where she is redeemed as a hero. Who in their right mind thought that this material was likely to work?!
"NuTrek," as fans derisively call the recent crop of Trek television shows, is long on tedious action sequences and expensive VFX, and short on the thought-provoking ideas that made Star Trek a success for decades. This movie, with its macro budget and micro runtime, plays like a concentrated form of NuTrek: It hurries the characters from one flashy action sequence to the next with no interest in developing them beyond their one-note personalities, nor does it appear to have thoughts on its mind about the morality or meaning of anything that happens along the way. The closest thing that it has to a unifying idea is that you don't have to accept your fate, except that the fate that Georgiou rejects here was already rejected years ago on Discovery. The underwritten villain of this film has more of an arc than she does. The supporting characters are all given a rushed introduction that ignores the show-don't-tell rule of screenwriting, and there are too many of them for material that's not going to be an ongoing series, and their obnoxiousness is proportionate to how much screen time they get. (Seriously, one of them is an alien the size of a speck of dust who inexplicably speaks with a thick Irish accent, and his entire personality is that he's proud of being tiny, which he brings up incessantly.)
The movie is not completely bad. There's one fun sequence with characters using technology to phase in and out of solid matter, in which Yeoh gets to do more of the fight scenes that have long been her stock in trade. But a few clever ideas like that, some amusing line readings (mostly from Sam Richardson, the only actor who underplays the material), and a surprise callback to one of Trek's alien races least likely ever to be seen again, are not nearly enough to justify this movie's existence. I hope that this film is a punctuation mark at the end of a much-too-long sentence.This review contains spoilers. Reveal it.
− January 25, 2025 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply
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Evie Totty: I saw that yesterday in "the list" and penciled it in for later.
I have to admit - I haven't seen Discovery, but mostly bc of my own SciFi acquaintances despising it. So once you said the character was originally from Discovery - I ugh-ed.
And then you went on to give her backstory and premise for the film. Gotta say, my head spun. Plus - it sounds like you have to have seen her stint on Discovery to get a full appreciation for her character.
Curious though - I can't remember if we discussed it - do you like SNW? I know it was rebirthed through Discovery, but I love it. Looking forward to the S3 premiere. − January 25, 2025 • more by Evie
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Scott Hardie: Yeah, Section 31 assumes some viewer familiarity with Discovery's early seasons. That's not critical, though. Honestly, the movie's so bad that it's probably going to be a disappointment whether you've seen Discovery or you're going in stone-cold. :-(
Discovery is not terrible, it's just a square peg that CBS/Paramount tried furiously to mash into a round hole. If they had left it alone after the originally planned 15-episode run, it might have been the best Trek series IMHO. (Other fans would probably still hate it. The only guarantees in life are death, taxes, and Star Trek fans complaining about new Star Trek.) Picard and Prodigy had similar problems, shows whose first seasons had a clear beginning-middle-end structure that required quite a bit of work to extend. I don't get why this is so hard: Doesn't the template for a successful, popular, and long-running Star Trek series already exist in the form of TOS, TNG, and VOY? Can't they just make something along those lines again? Strange New Worlds comes closest, but even they're trying too hard to make an ongoing arc out of the tedious Gorn storyline. Memo to Hollywood: Not every show on television has to be serialized! Episodic TV entertained generations of viewers just fine, and it really is the better way to go for something like Star Trek. (And I say that as a devoted Niner! DS9 was carefully planned for a long multi-year run from the start. It wasn't planned for 10-15 episodes only to have a longer run forced upon it.)
I like all of the new Trek shows to varying degrees, even Short Treks and its weird-as-hell third season. Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks are the best overall... but Picard's third season, though! Wow! − January 26, 2025 • more by Scott
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