Dark Forces, and stealing the Death Star plans? I hate to break it to you, but even before Disney bought the franchise and binned all the EU stuff, there were already over a dozen competing stories explaining how the Rebels stole the Death Star plans. Kyle wasn’t the first, or last, Rebel to get credit for that.
The old canon resolution for this was that everyone was stealing parts of the plan, which they compiled and transmitted to Leia’s ship. It’s not official any more, but no reason that can’t be your head canon for Dark Force and Rogue One coexisting. Should at least be excuse enough to see the best Star Wars movie since Empire.
And of coure there is the overarching theme of the series (of which the heist is a crucial part) of how Andor is moving from self-motivated criminal to a believer in the Cause.
I cannot suspend disbelief around major plot holes. Also, constantly being told things like “X is a great/brilliant leader” while seeing, over and over again, how utterly terrible/stupid X is as a leader. Game of Thrones suffered from that a lot in its later seasons, particularly with Sansa Stark (ok, actually, Sansa was never shown to be really terrible, but people were constantly talking up how smart she was, and she kept on dong things that were indicative of at best middling intelligence).
Well, obviously nobody’s going to convince anyone else on this, but suffice to say that, after having spent, what, six hours on this series and finding the writing (to my taste) to be horribly inconsistent, I have no interest in watching further for the purported payoff.
That’s a good example? Because that seems like an unbelievably trivial nitpick.
I’m not a hard-core Trekker by an stretch, but I’d consider myself a “moderate” fan… watched all the movies, all of TNG, most of DS9 and Voyager, a fair bit of the original series, read a bunch of books, etc. And if you’d given me a piece of paper and said “OK, start writing down things that JJ Abrams did that show a lack of respect/understanding for the source material”, I would never, ever, EVER have come up with that.
The problems with the Abrams Star Trek movies are numerous… plot holes, ridiculous inventions that invalidate the entire universe, silly coincidences, too much punching, characters who aren’t really the characters they are supposed to be, etc. But “chose not to respect an incredibly trivial bit of minutiae about starfleet markings” is not one of them. I mean, you could argue that it is part of a pattern of disrespect… a canary in the coal mine that emblemizes the larger ways in which he played fast and loose with Trek. But, honestly… that’s like saying that Peter Jackson has a fundamental misunderstanding of Lord of the Rings because Aragorn is described as bearded but the character in the movie didn’t have a beard.
I may be totally off base here… I’ve seen a lot of people pointing out that Aragorn’s beard in the movie is clearly not how it is described in the book, although doing so in an entirely different context, so I was just repeating that.
Don’t forget the product placement! The 23rd century may be a post-scarcity society where money does not exist, there’s no such thing as poverty or hunger because any product can be materialized out of thin air on demand, and everyone is free to pursue their true calling in life rather than worry about paying the bills, but they’ve still got Budweiser and Corvettes and Nokia phones and Jameson Irish Whiskey.
Not sure I agree about Mace Windu - I’m not sure his impact is as big as all of that. Though granted I’m less immersed in the Star Wars universe than many (I’m a pretty mid-tier fan relative to some). Otherwise those are all reasonable points.
The various attempts to rehabilitate the prequels is still a little overblown IMHO - they’re still not great or even solidly good films. More chaff than wheat at the end of the day. But there is no denying they had their good points. I don’t hate any of them.
