If they aren’t “bad”, they’re at best “okay.” And that’s disappointing after a long hiatus in movies that had been filled with a shared universe (with its own peaks and troughs) full of interesting and pretty-much accepted expansions to the lore.

And, this is entirely unsubstantiated, but I feel like much of the design of the new story was shaped by trying to skirt around copyright/“inspiration” issues by avoiding even ideas from the old expanded universe. Basically constructing a story around what was left in a “legally safe concepts” bucket.