Star Wars fans awakened by the force

Chris Liebe, 32, of West Toledo, is one of many parents passing the Star Wars magic along to a new generation. There was hyperspace. And it was all in one movie!

It didn’t stop in the theatre, either.

“It’s huge. I think we all want to go back to when we were kids”, he said. While these poor white-clad fellows have been at the butt of the joke for so long due to their infamously bad aim, this time the troopers are definitely the space soldiers, an army of the evil force, the way they were meant to be. The new X-Wing fighters are a thing of beauty and aerial dog fights have never looked more dynamic.

And while she agreed to marry her sweetheart ahead of the big movie premiere, Meg admitted she wasn’t always a Star Wars fan – “No but I love it. It’s such a fun story, and I love him so… it’s flawless”. We just don’t like that exclusive moral God at its root.

A member of the Mandalorian Mercs, a global costume-centric club of “Star Wars” fans who dress like some of the series’ famous bounty hunters, Doehler said he was invited by River Cinema to greet guests. He wasn’t surprised by Disney’s Death Star-sized plan to revive the franchise after acquiring Lucasfilm in 2012 for more than $4 billion. More than half of that was goodwill.

And while “The Force Awakens” certainly has some work to do to beat “Jurassic World’s” $208.8 million record-setting opening-weekend haul from this past summer, it seems a safe bet that Han Solo & Co. will wrestle the crown from those digital dinosaurs. His son, Samuel Vallejo, saw his first Star Wars movie as a newborn in 1999 with his father.

At Maya Cinemas Fresno 16, the new theater near Fresno State, Nadya Pirgova, 24, said she came to the United States from Russian Federation with her family when she was 9. I don’t live in this country anymore, and it changes a little bit every time I come back, but it still feels like home.

Strip-mining the earlier films and reworking with the benefit of better technology is precisely what George Miller did with Mad Max: Fury Road, so there’s no shame in it. But there’s no great glory either. Two men approached a ticket booth at a southern California theater and asked a series of “suspicious” questions, like “How crowded is it going to be this weekend?”

Again, it’s all enough to drive pretty much anyone who’s not a “Star Wars” nerd insane.

“That was what we wanted”, said Abrams, “that physicality”.

All that’s missing is the sense of wonder.