Then I don't understand why Titanic was the biggest movie in the world for a decade. Knowing everything will be ok in a macro sense, or in that case not be ok, is not an impediment to drama, otherwise you could never do a historical movie. I KNOW World War 2 came out OK, yet I had no problem enjoying Saving Private Ryan. I KNOW American won the cold war, but The Americans was gripping drama. Heroic fiction is no different. It's not the macro stakes, but the micro stakes that count. We know the Federation is going to be OK, but is Burnham? Or Saru? Or, in the case of the end of season 2, Cornwell?
Do you think Titanic is *about* the Titanic? No. It is about Jack and Rose. The Titanic is the historical setting, and it is about it insofar as it is about showing us a recreation of a point in history. That’s pretty much all historical fiction in a nutshell...making a character drama for one chunk of the audience, and some recreated detail for another, sometimes they even both appeal to the same people. There’s the third group, nitpickers, who go to see what they got wrong. Titanic isn’t about real people, and it’s sinking is just something that happens as a background to the drama. A very well detailed and thought out background, but always secondary to the drama. We know the boat is going to sink, and given the beginning of the film, we even know it’s unlikely Jack survives...what the film does is make you care.
‘Based on true events’ films are the same thing...some Will juice some extra fiction in to tell a story using history as it’s setting, some with outright lies (U571, Black Hawk Down, Braveheart.... XD) usually with a propagandist element. Some will be as faithful as they can be to real events, because they are drawing attention to those real events and the inherent drama. They are interesting because they are *real*. (And you still get nitpickers, my father is one xD)
Star Trek isn’t real, which means it *has* to at least look like its keeping its continuity more or less intact, otherwise it starts to break its illusion. It’s very much apples and oranges. 1917 is not a prequel to The Dambusters, just because they take place in the same universe (ie the real world) whereas Revenge of the Sith is a prequel to A New Hope. The stakes can be high in a WW2 film, because we *knew* they were high, for real. It’s a window into a world that’s gone but shaped ours, not a window into one someone just made up.
The nitpickers are useful in this regard, because, for them, the historical fiction breaks down exactly the way Trek does when it does something silly. Let’s make it something obvious, rather than say picking on Pearl Harbour or U571 (though that in particular is a fine example of it) let’s imagine a film ‘based on true events’ that has the US enter the war in 1940. You don’t need to be a WW2 history buff to know that’s wrong, and suddenly you don’t believe in the fiction any more. Your disbelief is no longer suspended. The more liberties taken, the more things fall apart. ‘True event’ narratives are a different beast to wholly fictional worlds, ‘historical fiction’ is different again. DSC and to a lesser extent ENT are both attempts at ‘historical fiction’ in a fictional universe, but don’t take into account exactly why this is almost impossible to make work in the Trek milieu.
Star Wars ironically will have less of a problem, because it’s already Science Fantasy. It doesn’t pretend to be our future.
Now, Alternate History is much easier sell, and For All Mankind is textbook for doing to the real world what they seemed at one one point to be aiming for in DSC. But once they chose to place DSC in Prime continuity, their goose was cooked.
