Wasted opportunity

Rating: 6/10 (18 December 2016)

What a shame they had a perfect setup for a film and made so many basic mistakes. What shot it down for me was how it doesn't jigsaw into Episode IV like it could have and absolutely should have. Too bad.
I liked the tributes and the set design. I really liked the reprogrammed Imperial droid. It was funny and clever. The Gold leader and Red leader cameos were really tight too. Even a silent shot of Porkins would have been icing on the cake.
The male co-star/protagonist: Who is he? What do we know about him? Do we care about him? Why is he in the film?
The Antagonist Orson Krennic was complete garbage. Not clever, not interesting, not anything. He had no game. He's basically a project manager. One who kills the senior members of the tech team. What if the DeathStar has a problem??? What if they need technical expertise. Woops! What a waste because that action showed he's just a stoopid thug.
Saw Gerrera: (Yeah, I saw him yesterday at the mall....) Same question. Who is he? Why do we care? Why is he in the film? Why was so much time wasted looking for him?!
Why is everything a tower?! Darth Vader's Crib: Tower. Imperial Archive: Tower (in Hawaii apparently) Well, the first stronghold was a football stadium... The Good Year star destroyer is over the stadium sports fans.
"We paid big bucks for the Governor Tarkin CG and god dammit we're going to use it."
It was very good. Amazing technology. But you cold tell and it bugged me too much because he had too much on screen time. Why was he so prevalent?
"I'm the senior scientist/architect of the DeathStar. But I'm going to put in a tiny obscure flaw that the Empire won't detect."
Who the hell will ever find this precisely?????
Be ready for another re-cut of Episode IV. Vader's opening lines will need to be changed from "Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebel spies...." to "Several files were walked on to this ship by rebel spies carrying a credit card..."
HOW IN HELL COULD THEY MESS THAT UP???????
This is not nerd nitpicking. There is suspension of disbelief and outright negligent writing.
I enjoyed it. Barely. But this should have been a 9 or 10.