I really had never seen Star Wars until this week ... and now I've watched it, I hate it

There have been five films since then and despite being a lifelong film enthusiast I have never had any desire to watch them. The thought of them has always left me cold. Wikipedia describes the series as an “American epic space opera franchise” and offhand I can’t think of a more grimly unpromising expression apart from “Sit down, I have some bad news for you.”

It has, though, been impossible to avoid the good-vs-evil, Galactic Republic-vs-Galactic Empire iconography - the lightsabers, the black-armoured, heavy-breathing Darth Vader, the white-armoured Stormtroopers; youthful Harrison Ford displaying his crinkly charm as freewheeling pilot Han Solo; Carrie Fisher’s fetchingly eccentric hairdo. And there’s no gainsaying Star War’s immense cultural and box-office impact, or the fact that millions of fans worldwide have a lasting emotional attachment to the work of George Lucas.

This last factor will be evident four days from now when the seventh film in the series, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, hits UK cinemas and pulverises all known opposition. Film magazines are saying it’s the most anticipated movie of the decade. The final trailer was reportedly watched more than 112m times online during its first 24 hours.

This week, as a person somewhat late to the party, I was asked to watch all six films for the first time - A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith.

I decided to watch the movies in chronological order, rather than the order in which they were released. The films were made in an odd sequence with the debut, A New Hope, released in 1977, beginning in the middle of the story arc. However, I began at the actual beginning of the story with The Phantom Menace, made in 1999. Apparently this wild confusion in structure all makes sense to Star Wars fans.

So, as I sat down to this film marathon, I thought, ‘May The Force, Russell, whatever that is, be with you.’

THERE’S surprisingly little pre-amble before we’re plunged into the action in the first prequel, The Phantom Menace: just an opening ‘title crawl’ that refers, soberingly, to the fact that taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute. This did not escape the attention of the great Anthony Lane, film critic at the New Yorker: “There are young Americans whose hearts will leap like deer at this news; if so, they will be the first creatures to be inspired, as the direct consequence of an aesthetic experience, to plan a career in the IRS.”

Lane also believes that the film is “a work of almost unrelieved awfulness”, and he is right. It may have made $100m in just five days, but it’s not a great film: it is soulless, disjointed and egregiously dull; the acting and dialogue are often wooden, and many of the aliens look like something out of a bad episode of Doctor Who from the 1970s.

Ewan McGregor, as Jedi apprentice Obi-wan Kenobi, speaks with a strangled upper-class accent, seemingly anticipating Sir Alec Guinness, who played the same (if much older) character in the original films. He is paired with Liam Neeson, at his best a formidable actor, who plays, without much in the way of evident enthusiasm, a Jedi master, Qui-Gon Jinn, and who dies in a duel with a foe named Darth Maul.

An early ally of theirs is Jar Jar Binks, a Gungan who, with his peculiar patois and witless “comedy” mishaps, almost had me reaching for the ‘off’ button on the remote. No wonder this half human-half reptile idiot was once voted the most annoying movie character of all time. When it was announced at a recent news conference that he wouldn’t be in The Force Awakens, cheers and applause rang out.

Where the film does succeed, however, is in the scale of its visuals. The pod-race is genuinely stirring. There’s a believable performance, too, from young Jake Lloyd, as nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker, a Jedi-in-the-making. But the highlights are few and far between. Another US film critic wrote: “If someone had given Ed Wood $115 million to remake Plan Nine From Outer Space it might have looked like this, although Wood’s dialogue would surely have been more memorable.”

The second prequel, Attack of the Clones, set 10 years later, is more tightly plotted: a separatist movement, led by Jedi Count Dooku (Christopher Lee), threatens the Republic. An assassination attempt on Senator Amidala (Natalie Portman) is followed by a heart-quickening pursuit of the would-be killer by Obi-wan and his headstrong apprentice, Skywalker.

The epic cityscapes are captivating, and there’s a vivid scene inside a sort-of Colosseum, in which the captured Obi-Wan, Skywalker and Amidala are to be put to death. But the dialogue is as stubbornly uninspired as before. Hayden Christensen, who plays Skywalker, struggles to carry the weight of the role - a crucial one, after all, given that he will cross over to the dark side and eventually become Darth Vader, the original Man in Black. The third prequel, Revenge of the Sith, essentially shows how Skywalker was lured into joining the dark side, manipulated by Chancellor Palaptine, who turns out not to be a good guy but a decidedly evil one (Ian McDiarmid, who plays him, is one of the few actors in the prequels who turns in a substantial performance).

As visually inventive as the films are, however, there’s a sense, even to the newcomer, of lots of unnecessary padding being stapled onto an already-slim backstory. They drag on for too long, coming to convincing life only in such scenes as the pod-race.

There are times when more attention has been paid to the computer-generated special effects than to anything else. Harrison Ford, speaking in general terms, said recently that his only problem with CGI is when it gets out of hand, “when it’s too kinetic and less focused on the emotional communication between the characters and the audience. Sometimes you lose, for want of a better term, human scale.” That, for me, is the problem with the prequels.

Actor Simon Pegg, a Star Wars fan since 1978, once described them as a “monumental misunderstanding of what the (original) three films are about. It’s an exercise in utter infanticide... (like) George Lucas killing his kid.”

It’s easy to lose sight, now, of how influential the very first Star Wars film was, back in 1977. Film critic and director Mark Cousins, in his book, The Story of Film, says it was one of three movies - the others were The Exorcist (1973) and Jaws (1975) - that brought about a “seismic change” in the film industry. Their success “changed American and then world cinema. The reason for making a film became that the audience would want to see it, not that a director wanted to make it. The interests of young people became more prioritised.” New escapist worlds and increasingly flashier effects were deployed in order to make things more exciting. The era of the blockbuster had begun.

Star Wars, says Cousins, turned out to be the most influential film in post-Second World War cinema. Watching it “felt like no other films experience. It was louder, it seemed to make the cinema shake, it moved through space with more dynamism than any previous film.”

It was, in the words of one noted US critic, the “most elaborate, most expensive, most beautiful movie serial ever made.” A London-based newspaper’s science correspondent described it as the best space-melodrama since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released in 1968.

The film was made in an era that seems positively sepia-toned now: Jim Callaghan was in Number 10. Jimmy Carter was in the White House. The Thatcher-Reagan era was still a few years away. Watching it for the first time, I was struck by its simple, unpretentious charm. But I saw both The Exorcist and Jaws at the time they came out, and the memory of them has haunted me ever since. Some of their scenes have a power than has remained undimmed. I don’t think there is anything I would have remembered from Star Wars had I watched it as a 16-year-old with an interest in film.

Granted, Lucas made it with ten-year-olds and 12-year-olds in mind. The Star Wars Facebook page, teeming with people’s fond recollections of that film, suggests that many fans first saw it when they were that age or even younger: four, five, six. At that age, it would have been easy to have been blown away by its scale, its heightened drama. Maybe they went to see it, became hooked on it, and, when they were older, passed that passion onto their own kids. Maybe I was already too old in 1977.

I’ve watched it three times now and each time the flaws seem like landmarks. Mark Hamill is too callow, Carrie Fisher too brittle. Of their droids, R2-D2 is quirkily engaging, a sort of forerunner to Wall-e, but C-3PO is a complainer and a scold. Yes, Alec Guinness lends it some gravitas, and Harrison Ford steals the show, but the simple plot and moral certainties lend it the air of one of those undemanding Saturday-morning serials I sat through in the cinema at the age of ten.

The other two films, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, are more sophisticated, with a more adventurous approach to the visual element: the snowbound setting at the start of the Empire Strikes Back, the stylised lightsaber duels, the thrilling high-speed chase on speeder bikes through a dense forest. The duel between Vader and Skywalker (“I am your father”) is absorbing, the denouement moving. Hamill has become more more nuanced.

It’s at moments such as these that the films come to life, when it’s possible to glimpse the reasons why the entire series has become so embedded in popular culture. But the three largely bloated prequels dismantle much of this legacy. Comparisons might be unfair but Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy packed far more emotional weight and narrative power, had more interesting and diverse characters, and ultimately was genuinely more engrossing, than the six Star Wars films I’ve seen. But that’s just a personal thing.

Harrison Ford has put Star War’s lasting popularity down to many factors, including a “strongly constructed mythology that informed us about our own potential. It gives us an example of what can be achieved through courage and conviction and facing up to the struggles that are part of all our lives.” It was, he added, all wrapped up in a fantastic world beyond our imagining, it benefits from great film-making and interesting characters, and has been passed on from generation to generation. Carrie Fisher has received letters from fans saying Princess Leia inspired them to lead the lives they had led.

On the other side of the fence sits Piers Morgan, who has tried and failed to watch the films, never getting beyond the five-minute mark. He now has what he describes as an “oddly visceral loathing” of all things Star Wars. You can, he added with a trademark flourish, “stick this over-rated, over-hyped, fantastically silly nonsense up your R2-D2.”

Which is one way of putting it. The reason for the films’ knows-no-bounds popularity will forever remain a mystery to me: as I watched them this week, initial intrigue gave way to boredom then fatigue. The three prequels dragged on for an eternity to no great purpose. The three originals were more concise and (in the case of the second two, the pick of the bunch) more entertaining, but, taken as a whole, they left me with one thought: what on earth is all the fuss about?

Still, that’s as nothing compared to the massive weight of expectation surrounding the new film. If you have ever doubted the pulling-power of a franchise that began almost 40 years ago, have a look at the crowds milling outside your nearest multiplex on Thursday, all of them eager to see a movie they have been anticipating for several years.