Written by: Craig Sweeny
Story by: Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt
Directed by: Olatunde Osunsanmi
So the Terran empire runs some kinda hunger games for the next evil emperor… and the current evil emperor is just cool with abdicating I guess?
I wish I could enjoy it, but it just feels so dumb to watch a fairy tale transfer of power in the most evil setting.
That was the best Syfy-channel-pilot-for-a-show-that-ultimatley-didn’t-get-picked-up-from-2002 that I’ve ever seen.
There’s a germ of a good idea here. A show following a band of misfits around the edges of the Star Trek universe while they get into and out of trouble could be fun. Several of the characters like Zeph and Fuzz have interesting concepts which we haven’t seen yet in Star Trek.
The bad however out weighs the good. One, it makes no sense for a super-secret spy agency to employ this bunch of marginally competent weirdos and it really doesn’t sell why a team of by the book Starfleet Intelligence officers couldn’t have handled this problem by the end of the opening credits.
Two, a history as a genocidal space dictator isn’t just a quirky character trait. The movie sometimes wants to deal with that seriously and other times treats it as a joke. I don’t know if there is a right way to deal with it, but this movie definitely isn’t it.
Three, this movie definitely inherits many of Discovery’s worst traits of frenetic camera work and inability to slow down long enough for us to get to know the characters.
Well said. Especially agree on point one. I’m not a fan of the Discovery era characterization of Section 31, but ultimately there was no reason they had to be related to this movie at all. Georgiou had plenty of personal reasons to deal with this and to have a collection of ne’er-do-wells on hand without any involvement from Starfleet / S31.
Okay, I enjoyed it as a breezy action movie.
I had a goofy grin on my face for much of the first act - it had style, which sort of fell away over time, which was unfortunate.
The Georgiou story is by far the strongest aspect of the movie - long-lost lover seeking revenge isn’t the most original of plots, but it’s executed well enough, and Michelle Yeoh is pretty terrific as expected. I particularly liked her line about a monster with a conscience being useless.
The middle act probably should have been simplified. The mole storyline was a distraction that prevented us from getting to know the new characters, and every single one of them suffers for it. Garrett’s storyline needed more meat, and I would have appreciated more time spent with Alok beyond just the exposition of his backstory. Quasi skates by on Sam Richardson’s considerable charm alone.
All in all, I think the movie is worth the time, even if no one’s going to call it “deep” any time soon. I’d certainly be interested in watching them go to Turkana IV.
RIP Zeph. You were too beautiful for this world.
I was reasonably entertained while watching the movie, but ultimately I can’t quite figure out what the show was trying to say.
Given that “Section 31” was originally conceived as a series, I think the influences of that are clear. For example, the introduction of a band of misfits that are clearly meant to keep on adverturing and the framing device of “transmissions” with individual titles.
The challenge is that the time we were allowed didn’t give us enough time to really know any of the new characters, which is a shame because they offered an interesting and rare opportunity to see what life is like in the ST universe outside of Starfleet. Those unique perspectives are one reason why DS9 continues to be so well-regarded and why I found season 1 of PIC actually quite compelling.
I think the shorter format would have been better served if it was a story exclusively about Georgiou finding a new place for herself after what she had learned from her DIS experiences, maybe leading up to a final confrontation with San which interrogated the idea of a “good dictator”. Indeed, I found the flashbacks and her interactions with San the most engaging parts of the movie. But because that comprised only a small part of the movie, we didn’t really learn much more about her than we already knew. And the actual bond/conflict between them was never particularly clear, with San’s motivations coming from left field.
The movie also suffered from what I call the “Inception effect” which is that it set up some potentially interesting mysteries but then solved them in the most boring manner. Having Fuzz be the mole was such an obvious choice, given that they had clearly established his ability to control electronics. As I was watching, I actually thought he was a red herring and that Melle was the mole all along, using her masked accomplice to fake her death at the beginning (a la “Gambit”). That would have at least turned Melle into an actual character, but I guess Deltans are cursed to die in the first third of any movie they’re in.
we didn’t really learn much more about her than we already knew.
Yeah. I said in my original comment that the Georgiou storyline is the strongest one, but it still feels very much like the first chapter that sets up future development, rather than something that pushed her story very far forward. It basically positions her as realizing that maybe a “monster with a conscience” isn’t so useless after all, and that she can work to atone for her past misdeeds.
Which is fine…but it’s still a setup for future stories that may never happen. It very much feels like a series pilot, rather than a standalone movie.
I completely agree with all of the other stuff you mention about the other characters, and I think it just screams, “we tried to compress an entire season’s worth of story into a single movie.” A lot of stuff happens, but everything that would get us invested in the characters was cut.
The Fuzz reveal makes a lot more sense if if happens in, say, episode 7 out of 10.
