What could have been

I think Section 31 as a concept is really quite lame, like a covert division of Internal Affairs of the de facto Galaxy Police organisation?
It was just Sloan who was so well written and was so well performed that made it a fucking brilliant peek at Section 31.
- I think Section 31 as a concept is really quite lame, like a covert division of Internal Affairs of the de facto Galaxy Police organisation?
  Not internal affairs, CIA. The Federation at large gets to keep their hands clean and stand tall morally. Section 31 comes in and fucks stuff up doing all the immoral shit needed to preserve and expand the Federation.
  Federation: "Bio weapons are a war crime and morally indefensible"
  Section 31: "Yeah thats great to take a moral position, but the Federation was facing extinction, so we clandestinely created a bio weapon that works only on the shape-shifting 'Founders' and used our own allied shapeshifter to infect them without his knowledge killing his own people to push the 'Founders' into submission and stop the overpowering invasion of the Alpha quadrant."
  Sisko working with Garak murdering Romulan Senator Vreenak was absolutely Section 31 material.
  
  Sisko working with Garak murdering Romulan Senator Vreenak was absolutely Section 31 material.
  It's also arguably something that Article 14, Section 31 is actually meant for. The Dominion was in the process of conquering the entire quadrant and dismantling the Federation government, among others, and they had the means and manpower to do so. That's an extreme and existential threat. The thing Sloan tricked Bashir into doing with the Romulans, on the other hand, is just a regular Tuesday with the RSE as your neighbors and therefor not an extreme threat.
- They even had their hands on a fairly well respected wartime admiral (Ross).
  
  I'm moderately curious what they had on him. But I don't want to know.
- Sloan being IA was just a cover, S31 doesn't actually have anything to do with IA. It's its own thing.

i don't want any section 31 stuff because the very concept of a rogue black ops terror group being necessary to maintain a peaceful galactic society goes against everything i enjoy about star trek
- And DS9, which introduced the concept, concluded they were the bad guys and that S31 made things worse on the whole. The dark and gritty Trek that deconstructs the franchise as a whole and the Federation in particular still decided that Section 31 was a bad idea.
  On top of that, every show after DS9 completely fails to understand that S31 was supposed to be a conspiracy, not an actual branch of Starfleet. The bit of the charter they cite to justify themselves requires some pretty significant mental gymnastics to make work, and it most certainly doesn't literally sketch out a whole branch of Starfleet. It's clearly there for things like when you have to violate time travel laws to pick up whales from the past to keep Earth from getting blown up, or when you have to direct a universe destroying anomaly to a specific universe so that your transporter duplicate can fix it before it destroys other universes. Those are extraordinary threats. The stuff S31 typically concerns itself with, like Romulans scheming against everyone, are ordinary threats that regulations already cover.
- Abso-fucking-lutely this100%! I'm glad that movie was awful. Maybe they'll leave it behind.

Did we want a Section 31 movie?
The whole concept is a mistake. People are really way too cool with DS9 being a revisionist Trek thing. Maybe I'm just old enough to have thought it was missing the point at the time and now it's been grandfathered in.
The movie was also pretty bad, though.

Just wanted a movie about the shady underside of Starfleet, how they operate outside the law. Got some nerfed crap instead
- I wanted a cool spy story with intrigue, covert infiltration, and such. Instead I got some silly Marvel knock off with fire everywhere.

So much lost potential.
- I'd cast today's Tim Robbins as an aged and grizzled Section 31 Boimler:
  Doesn't he look like a Boimler that has seen some shit?
  
  Good call.
  As if life in the seedy underbelly has taken its toll.
- Uhm..yes...about lost potential (a bit nsfw):
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2V6zDJyhTSU&t=0m15s
  
  Yeah, Death went through some odd phases.

S31 works when it's a rarely seen clandestine group of a handful of individuals working in the shadows.
Not when they're a moderately known branch of starfleet with the subtly of a 2x4 to the face

The Section 31 Movie I wanted:

“I’m a super spy and must stay incognito. Let me pretend to be the only emotional Vulcan.” - an absolute idiot

Wait, what if Star Trek but griddy and fuuuuuuuuuucked uuuuuuuuuup?!

I really don't understand what they were trying to accomplish with this film
It felt more like a fanfic film put together by some really good production people with just barely enough of a budget to put things together
It tries to be slapstick, serious, funny and dark all at the same time while never really pulling off any of those things.
There were also many elements and moments where I felt like I was watching the latest Star Wars movies or TV series ... even the ending felt like it was lifted from Star Wars:Return of the Jedi with the death and redemption scene of Darth Vader.
I love Star Trek for the original Scifi writing and imagination that came out of some great minds that wanted to imagine a future full of strange unusual things, ideas, events, situations and forced us all to look at ourselves and our own civilization and what we are doing ..... not a bunch of flashy lights, war, fighting and good guy/bad guy crap with fancy martial arts fighting. I get all that stuff elsewhere where it is done better, funnier, darker and more serious in other films.

It wasn't the worst movie I've ever seen. It was just the worst star trek movie I've ever seen