“It’s shit, Jim, but not as we know it.”
I need to preface all that comes after with two things:
First, I like Michelle Yeoh. I’m sure she had fun filming this. And I don’t blame her for picking up the paycheck, because I’m sure they sent a dump truck full of money to her house after her Oscar win.
And second, I’m far from what I’d consider much of a film critic. Most of what I’ve reviewed falls into the category of popcorn films, and it’s not exactly like I really went into what made them good or bad as a film, usually more as a storytelling device at best. Even then most might see those as shoddy criticism compared to someone more accomplished in that field. But I’m really going to try here.
So…
This film is absolutely noxious. And I mean that. Every action scene is made up of shaky, snap zoomed 3 second clips. It is one of the most jarring, nauseating movies I’ve seen. And frankly, it really brings to mind crap like Battlefield Earth. There, I said it.
I’m also going to point out the color grading. You naturally have the extremely un-Star-Trek-like blue/orange that we all know and hate from Discovery that leaves everything feeling dark and bleak. We also almost immediately get the piss filter, despite the fact that none of these characters ever go anywhere near Mexico. It’s not even used exclusively for flashbacks, so you get that healthy urine goodness anytime they’re not on a ship or space station.
Things open with a mission briefing narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, and every line of it is terrible. Which is something of a running theme, as I don’t think there’s a single line in the film by either script or delivery that doesn’t make my spine want to cringe its way out of my back.
We then cut to a flashback of Philippa Georgiou’s childhood. Apparently, the Terran Emperor is not chosen in the way you’d think based on all Mirror Universe media that ever existed (you know, good old Klingon Promotion), but instead through a Hunger Games because we’re very original. She then fatally poisons her family and burns the only other kid to make it through the Hungry Games with a hot sword in the face, making him her slave forever.
And this all really begs the question: why are we trying to have a redemption arc for Cannibal Space Hitler? Mirror Georgiou is a character that doesn’t really work in a long form story. This isn’t a Vegeta situation; she flat out stops being fun when she’s the focus and is no longer menacing.
Anyway, despite being sent back or whatever in a season of Star Trek Discovery I refuse to watch, Mirror Georgiou is still in the not!mirror universe. To my recollection, it’s never explained how she’s still here. She’s running a space station club/lounge with a space opera lady on stage because we all saw The Fifth Element. After a brief failed op by serious Section 31 guy to knock Mirror Georgiou out to carry out an even dumber op that they explain later, we’re introduced to our ragtag group of dipshits:
- Alok, the serious Section 31 guy, who later explains his backstory as a guy from the Eugenics Wars who was taken in by an Augment and himself augmented after the fact (I don’t think that’s how that works, but it doesn’t matter because we’ve already committed enough sins to get a failing grade).
- Some Deltan lady whose name and characterization don’t matter because she gets fuckin’ vaporized less than 15 minutes later.
- Quasi, a shapeshifter who very rarely shapeshifts and tends to get stuck on probabilities
- Zeph, a guy that looks more like he walked out of Cyberpunk (side note: all of these biomechanical characters they write clash with the Federation as a setting so hard, I shouldn’t even have to point it out) and seems to have an IQ of 48.
- Fuzz, a Nanokin (ingenious species name there) piloting a human sized robot Vulcan because we all saw Men in Black, one of the least successful films of all time. Fuzz cannot act like a Vulcan; someone thought this was particularly clever. The worst thing about Fuzz, in my opinion, is that every time they show the tiny space penis in control, none of his mouth flaps match the dialog.
- Rachel fucking Garrett, who was apparently over 100 years old in Yesterday’s Enterprise according to this. Once again, it seems they picked something off of Memory Alpha without bothering to read anything.
I’m not going to bore you too much with story details, but everything hinges on a superweapon. And even the Star Wars EU doesn’t have anything on how stupid and spiteful the Godsend (the superweapon) is. It’s “like a virus” that infects and destroys planets, strong enough to wipe out a quadrant. So, aside from the fact that the writer has no actual idea how this would work, there’s also no sense of scale as per usual for anything connected to Discovery (would you be surprised to find that Craig Sweeny only wrote one episode of Discovery? Because I was).
Back when Mirror Georgiou had this thing made, the slave guy with the burned face (San) faked his death with the same poison Georgiou used on her family. So after he vaporizes the Deltan lady, he manages to get the Godsend. And then, everything’s a race to get to him to stop him before he can detonate the thing and hop back to the mirror universe through an anomaly that occurs at regular intervals.
Frankly, there are too many action scenes in this movie. That might sound like an odd complaint, but you have to remember that every single one of them is an assault on your senses. If you have Dramamine to hand, you might just find yourself reaching for it. Because the way almost every single action scene is shot and edited is highly disorienting.
I’m also going to take the chance to point out that it took me roughly 9 hours to get through this 1 hour and 30 minute movie. That’s because I kept finding other things that held my attention better. At one point, that was cleaning up cat vomit. So, no, I don’t think very highly of this movie’s artistic merit.
Also, I refuse to spend time going back through this dreck just to get screenshots. You can be satisfied with the trailer:
Ultimately, Mirror Georgiou manages to kick San’s sword into his carotid artery, killing him by accident (they loved each other, once). The Godsend goes off, but it doesn’t seem to matter for… reasons. It’s a happy (?) ending for everyone in the group that isn’t dead. Fuzz, who got blown up after his betrayal, might still be alive, because his wife (who says so) is there in the exact same type of Vulcan robot, only instead of a terrible Irish accent, she has a terrible Southern US accent. Jamie Lee Curtis makes an appearance via hologram as her character Control, which likely paid for a few Tony Tony Chopper figures.
So do I recommend it? NO. It’s not just a bad Star Trek movie; it’s a bad movie in general. I’m sure as hell not going to condemn the actors for getting a paycheck off of this. But I’m also not going to argue that anything on display here was actually competent. The entire movie was deep hurting for me, in numerous forms.
I’m not bothering with stars, this gets a big, fat zero.
About Author
