Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Section 31.Michelle Yeoh’s Academy Award-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once feels more like Star Trek in many ways than Star Trek: Section 31 does. Yeoh returns as Emperor Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Section 31, which picks up sometime after she was sent back in time in Star Trek: Discovery season 3. Now in the early 24th century, Georgiou gets pulled into a mission to save the Federation by an eclectic group of Section 31 agents. While Section 31 features some fun sci-fi action, it ultimately feels like it’s missing something quintessentially Star Trek.
Everything Everywhere All at Once took the 2023 Oscars by storm, winning seven awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress, cementing it as one of the best Michelle Yeoh movies ever. Yeoh portrays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese immigrant mother who runs a laundromat with her family. However, she is soon yanked from her stressful everyday life into an absurd adventure involving the fate of the multiverse. With its universe-jumping storyline and wacky sci-fi action, EEAAO already has elements of Star Trek, yet its core message feels more like Star Trek than whatever Section 31 was trying to say.
Everything Everywhere All At Once Celebrates Connection & Kindness (& That Feels Very Star Trek)
Everything Everywhere Celebrates The Themes Star Trek Is Known For
Throughout Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn fights to survive against multiverse-jumping enemies and glimpses what her life could have been had she made different choices. As the multiverse threatens to unravel and Evelyn sees more of it, she temporarily accepts the nihilistic belief that nothing matters. In the end, however, Evelyn’s husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) helps her see the importance of kindness and connecting with the people around her. Waymond, who puts googly eyes on things to make people smile, fights against the apparent meaningless of the world with empathy.
Everything Everywhere All at Once uses an absurdist multiverse story to illustrate the importance of love and compᴀssion. It would be difficult to find a more Star Trek message than that. Since its inception, Star Trek has been a celebration of diversity, compᴀssion, and kindness, as well as one of science fiction’s most hopeful visions of the future. Both Everything Everywhere and Star Trek celebrate the beauty that can be found in a nonsensical life, even in a universe where everything is purple or where everyone has H๏τ dogs for fingers.
Star Trek: Section 31’s Theme Is Unclear
Section 31’s Message of Redemption Gets Somewhat Muddied
This is not to say that Star Trek: Section 31 is an entirely bad film. It has its moments, and Michelle Yeoh is always compelling as Emperor Georgiou, but the film’s theme is somewhat muddied. Section 31 tries to tell a story about Georgiou’s redemption, but Star Trek: Discovery already did that with its second and third seasons. As a television series, Discovery had more time to make viewers care about Georgiou as a character and to show her change gradually. With its opening flashback scene, Section 31 actually makes it harder to root for Georgiou, further complicating its theme of redemption.
Jaime Lee Curtis pops up briefly in Star Trek: Section 31 as Control, reuniting with Michelle Yeoh, after her Oscar-winning turn as Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s Deirdre Beaubeirdre.
While there are some compelling members of Georgiou’s Section 31 team (Sam Richardson’s Quasi and Kacey Rohl’s Rachel Garret are particular standouts), the viewer does not have enough time to get to know them. Georgiou’s relationship with San (James Hiroyuki Liao) also comes to a depressing conclusion. Ultimately, Section 31 doesn’t feel quite as much like Star Trek as it could have, and its central message remains somewhat unclear. Ironically, Everything Everywhere All at Once has a more “Star Trek” message than Star Trek: Section 31.
