Not unlike the first star trek movie actually if i remember the criticisms of old correctly.
The first Star Trek movie is very, very hard to get a handle on.
Like the Wing Commander movie, it has a really, really obvious criticism: Wing Commander just wasn't a good movie... and ST:TPM was really, really boring.
Unlike the Wing Commander movie, fans can't use continuity as a crutch for critiquing it: ST:TMP does a very good job of being a Star Trek movie. They brought back all the actors, explained all the stylistic changes and literally took the script from a TOS episode.
The later succesful Star Trek movies *didn't* do this and ended up being excellent films in their own right. I think that teaches us something about Hollywood's experience in adapting
Think about Star Trek II -- it's a classic movie, but it really, really isn't anything like Star Trek. Suddenly everyone is in a space Navy full of new space Navy anachronisms (hand loaded torpedo tubes, cannon broadsides and the like). Despite being played by the same actors, the characters are all completely rewritten. Kirk isn't an action hero anymore, he's someone who putters around worrying about how old he is. But it *worked* as a movie, so Star Trek fans love it. It's hard to separate the characters in movies 2-7 with them in the original series because it's so widely accepted.
My point, I think, is that if the Wing Commander movie had worked it would be universally accepted... and if it had been a completely literal translation of Wing Commander and still failed, we still would have hated it.
Angle American (or sdounds like one!) another major error and Maniac. He's not a Maniac like Maniac in the games. Also I didn't like how there was made up stuff about Blair's parents. He would of been famousin WC1 like Casey was in WCP. I just don't know how Chris Roberts could of FCUKed his own creation?
Angel as an American is a new one to me -- she's played by English actress Saffron Burrows, so the ordinary criticism is that she's too British instead of Belgian.
I do think they got Maniac right, though... in the original game, Maniac was just an unlikable jerk. It's only in Wing Commander III/IV/P that Tom Wilson played him as a comedian -- in the original game he was just someone you hated. And I think we all hated Matthew Lillard.
As for Chris Roberts... it's a good question. We've got three drafts of the script online here at the CIC and you can see exactly what Chris Roberts' contribution was when he rewrote the thing. I don't really have a good handle on it myself yet, though.