Let us cut to the chase: Star Trek: Section 31, a new direct-to-streaming feature from CBS Studios and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, is deeply awful stuff. Taken on its own merits, and it is a tiresome mess of stereotypes and camp dialogue. Less Guardians of the Galaxy and more Borderlands, it makes a cynical stab at being something edgy and bold for the Star Trek universe but misses the mark. It aims for provocation and lands on pretence. If you believe, as I do, that Star Trek is not just a setting but a mission – either heading for utopia or challenging it  – then Section 31 is an even more egregious failure. This new production is not heading anywhere. It is just people in silly costumes running away from explosions.

What is particularly galling is that Section 31 itself, the secret intelligence wing of Star Trek’s beloved Starfleet, is one of the franchise’s darkest and most genuinely challenging elements. Introduced back in the mid-1990s during Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it suggested that the lofty ideals on which the heroes operated were only possible because there were other, less idealistic, forces doing the dirty work behind the scenes. This then-fresh element reached its pinnacle in the 1998 episode “In the Pale Moonlight”, in which the previously heroic Captain Benjamin Sisko is forced into political assassination in order to win a war. As I noted earlier, to my mind Star Trek at its best is either striving to showcase utopia or purposefully challenging it.

Section 31 does neither. It picks up on Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), former genocidal queen of a parallel universe, as she is recruited into a team of mercenaries to track down a mysterious super-weapon that has just hit the galactic black market. Her team includes a moody commander (Omari Hardwick), a camp shapeshifter (Sam Richardson), a camp fake Vulcan controlled by a microscopic alien (Sven Ruygrok), an idiot in a mechanical suit (Robert Kazinsky), a camp walking honeytrap (Humberly Gonzalez), and a very confused Starfleet officer (Kacey Rohl). There is a lot of camp in there.

Of course Georgiou is the campest of them all, strutting around her own movie like an over-confident cabaret performer. Michelle Yeoh is an excellent actor with a long, now Oscar-winning, career of strong performances. Hand on heart, evil space queen Georgiou is the worst thing she has ever done. There are no enjoyable characters here. There is no one to root for.

There isn’t even any sincerity. Section 31 goes to great lengths to remind the audience that Georgiou is murderous and untrustworthy. Nothing she does during the film’s central storyline appears particularly murderous. Among her ‘rag-tag’ team of idiots, she is almost certainly the most trustworthy one. Section 31 would like to tell its audience that it is an edgier, more morally dubious representation of Star Trek – sadly it is too gutless and conservative a production to actually follow through on its claims.

It has taken more than five years of development for this project to see fruition. In that time, Michelle Yeoh has only seen demand for her services increase. As a result, this once-promised 10 episode series has been condensed to 96 minutes; I doubt CBS could keep Yeoh for anything longer. Any potential subtlety or depth has been lost in the process. What is left is just colourful noise. It flashes and spins like a children’s toy. A cheap one.