PRAISE: When you have a popular side character and equally popular actor or actress the film and TV studios rub their hands together and say : It's Spinoff Time !! . In this short movie about former Emperor Philippa Georgiou being tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets. But also coming to terms with her genocidal past Michelle Yeoh, does her best with the script as Georgiou. I actually enjoyed watching her back story which was the strongest part of the movie. Joining her in her tasks are some interesting characters that come with personalities and quirks that were highly likeable including: Deltan Melle portrayed by the beautiful Humberly Gonzalez,Quasi (Sam Richardson), who can morph into any physical form and Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), who looks like a Vulcan but is really a Nanokin. Some of the jokes and dialogue worked for me and I even found myself laughing out loud. The SFX looked flawless in several scenes.
PROBLEMS: There was absolutely no chemistry between Yeoh and Omari Hardwick as Alok Sahar.The movie uses so many old tricks and switcheroos that ive seen before that were supposed to be shocking but were just predictable. One characters screen time was far too brief. I was actually pissed when the character was removed from the board.There is some odd zoom in zoom out camera work that was annoying and then some. This was definitely trying to be a combination of Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad and I wonder if the execs at Paramount suddenly decided to make this a short movie instead of a series months before it's late January release. If it had become a series it definitely would have just been turned on as background noise for me.
Scale of 1 to 10 a 4