It’s been a week since the release of the Section 31 streaming movie starring Academy Award winning actress Michelle Yeoh, reprising her tole as former Terran emperor Georgiou as she joins a top-secret suicide squad of Section 31 to take care of some business. It’s new Star Trek… so why isn’t uncle Dave talking about the new Star Trek thing?
Because I didn’t watch it. And I don’t plan on watching it.
In case you folks haven’t been paying attention or simply are unaware, previous trailers and preview material of this thing left me uninspired over this product. It looks bad, cheap, and second-rate. I’m not going to go into whether this is “actual Star Trek” or not because that doesn’t really matter. Something that looks bad looks bad regardless of whether or not it fits into what you define as “actual Star Trek.” And this Section 31 movie looked BAD. Even so, I would have at least given it a chance had word of mouth provided a glimmer of hope that maybe – just maybe – this is not as bad as everything looks to be. Maybe this could actually turn out to be a pretty entertaining movie.
Well, it’s been a week… and all the reviews and receptions that I’ve seen of this thing has been largely negative. Some have even compared this to the recent Borderlands movie – something featuring award-winning big name actors phoning in a performance on a script written by hack amateurs. Let me tell you folks something; anything that has it described to me as “Star Trek as conceived by Randy Pitchford” is enough for me to go “Nah, I’m good.”
I don’t care if it’s got the Star Trek branding or not. I’m under no moral obligation nor do I have any civil fandom duty or whatever to watch this film. I’m not going to waste time watching something that I know I’m not going to like. The whole concept of “hate watching” that seems to be a thing on internet culture – watching something you know you’re going to hate for the expressed purpose of hating something and expressing it online – is just utterly stupid. I’ve probably fell into that trap once at most and I’ve since regretted it – the actual watching part, not the words that resulted from that viewing. Any way you slice it, I refuse to fall into that trap again. Hence, my not watching Section 31.
Besides, that would require a subscription to Paramount Plus… and that’s one more streaming subscription that I do not require at the moment, so I can easily pass on that.
Now, is that a hard ban like some other films that I’ve sworn off? Of course not. There might come a time when, if I’ve got nothing better to do and curiosity has the better of me, I might actually give it a fair shake. That’s going to be a good while, however. Right now, I feel like I’d be going in with expectations that it’s going to be an outright awful waste of time that I’m going to regret wasting and I don’t want to do that. So, yeah, if it turns out to be vaguely entertaining schlock, great. That’s not the feeling I’m getting now from this thing. That’s not the feeling I want to go into a movie. I want to find some enjoyment out of it. Even if it’s bad and I end up mocking it, that’ll at least entertain me and that’ll be enough to make me like it just a tad.
That time is not now for Section 31. It simply doesn’t appeal to me… besides, despite the bad reviews, it’s actually been doing great in terms of streaming numbers, so clearly it doesn’t need another voice dogpiling on it.
In the meantime, there’s plenty of other things for me to bitch about that I’m not going to go into wanting to hate, but end up being more disappointed than most… what’s going on over at AEW as of late?
dtm666 