With a film whose existence is rooted in fan culture, describing the movie is perilous even revealing the cast list runs the risk of providing potential plot spoilers.
Ironic, then, that watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I found myself feeling like a 12-year-old, reading for the first time the words: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, hearing John Williams’s fanfare theme and discovering what all the fuss was about. Now, as Episode VII rolls around, ushering in a new generation of sequels, I find myself at an age so out of whack with the film’s target demographic that what I think about it matters not a jot. The sight of a fleet of X-wings hurtling toward us over watery terrain brought a lump to my throat and a tear to my eye When the prequels began at the end of the 90s, I was still young enough to be working for Radio 1 (the station that had overwhelmingly voted Star Wars the greatest movie of all time) but old enough to know that this new series had little of the timeless charm of the originals, about which I remained agnostic. When the first trilogy began back in the late 70s, I was old enough to be wedded to the darker, moodier sci-fi of Solaris, Silent Running and Soylent Green, and young enough to believe that gave me the right to dismiss this latterday Buck Rogers nonsense out of hand. I have always been the wrong age for Star Wars.
