My kids wanted to watch it and I honestly felt a bit of dread as we started it—this movie has become so overrated and I know its beats so well, it hardly feels joyful anymore to revisit it. But I made a conscious effort to try and look at it through fresh eyes and pretend that the whole rest of the franchise—not just the prequels and the cartoons and the latest trilogy never happened, but even to pretend that episodes V and VI never existed either. That brought back a bit of the mystery and wonder. The universe of Jedis and the Force and clone wars and all of that just seemed so much more interesting when we didn’t really know what they were, when it wasn’t all explained to us. I think we forget sometimes that a lot of what seemed so thrilling about this movie was the things that it only hinted at, when our imaginations were doing the work, and when we couldn’t buy tie-ins and spin-offs and backstories for every nook and cranny.