The latest installment in the Star Wars series has a new director (J. J. Abrams). Fans will be relieved to know that it is not like the prequels. It is much more like the original trilogy and fans of those movies will almost certainly like this one.

The only way you are likely to be disappointed is if you go in hoping for something new and revolutionary, something as game-changing as the first movie was when it first appeared. The Force Awakens is so derivative of the first movie that it feels a bit like a reboot. So don’t expect anything more than a first-rate popcorn movie. It fulfills that role quite well.

The surviving main characters from the original trilogy appear in The Force Awakens, but they mostly look older and worse for wear since 30 years of story time have past. Fortunately there are some new younger characters to take up the slack.

• The New Order is a movement to revive the bad old Empire.
• The Resistance is like the old Rebel Alliance, trying to liberate star systems controlled by the New Order.
• Rey (Daisy Ridley) is a girl from a desert planet. She looks rather like Princess Leia but she plays a role more like Luke.
• Finn (John Boyega) is a deserter from the New Order’s Stormtrooper army. He acts sort of like a proto-Han Solo. (Is this how Han got his start?)
• Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is a young Darth Vader wannabe.
• BB-8 looks like R2D2 but is smaller and cuter.
• Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong’o) is an alien bar owner who is sort like Yoda without the funny syntax.

If you’ve seen the first movie you don’t really need to see this, but if you loved the first movie you should probably see this anyway.

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