Warning: this review contains quite a lot of major spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Make sure you have seen it before reading this as it’s dead good.

Surely it is not news to anyone that there is a new Star Wars film out. There must be bacteria on Saturn that are aware of this. For the second time in my lifetime, a new Star Wars trilogy has exploded into the cinema with more hype than I thought was possible.

Clearly as a culture, we love Star Wars. Or at least the middle class geeky, mainly male, cultural group I move in loves Star Wars. Not even Harry Potter can so completely unite my Twitter and Facebook timelines in squeals of fannish delight. This new Star Wars film has reached near omnipresent status. It is everywhere and everyone is talking about it.

Star Wars has captured the cultural zeitgeist for a number of reasons, but mainly because this time the fans dared to hope that it would be good. Three sub-par, at best, prequels from George Lucas could not dampen our enthusiasm for more Star Wars. Fans are practically salivating with anticipation for another trip to a galaxy far, far away.

The fans have every reason to be excited; J.J. Abrams is a good director and has made two very entertaining Star Trek movies. His rambunctious take on Star Trek strikes me as an expensive means of auditioning to helm the new Star Wars trilogy. I cannot think of a director who would be better for the role. The trailers showed a lot of promise; the force is strong with this one.

There is one very difficult line Abrams had to walk, one that could make or break his take on Star Wars: how much do you rely on the recognisable characters and motifs from the original Star Wars and how much do you make this a film in its own right? Nostalgia verses originality. Clearly the film needs some of both, but getting the right balance is not easy.

Watching Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, I must admit that it was great to have the classic Star Wars iconography back, something that had been missing from the prequel trilogy. It was wonderful to see a film with tie fighters, stormtroopers, star destroyers, X-wings and the Millennium Falcon. However, The Force Awakens did not rely too heavily on classic Star Wars characters. I appreciated seeing Lela, C-3PO and R2-D2 again but I am glad their appearances were brief to allow new characters to assert themselves.

Said new characters were excellent. We had BB-8, the cute new robot rolling around, which looked convincing because it was a physical character that did not rely on computer effects. The new protagonist, Rey (Daisy Ridley), is engaging and sympathetic, from the beginning we are rooting for her to succeed. There is also Finn, a stormtrooper who does not want to be a stormtrooper anymore, played by John Boyega, who delivers the performance of the film, bringing energy and humour to the part. There is also Adam Driver playing new visor-wearing villain Kylo Ren, who is everything a blockbuster antagonist should be, creepy, evil, charismatic and a little bit frightening.

Despite having a mainly fresh cast, The Force Awakens is filled with nods to Lucas’ original trilogy. From when Finn accidently activates the holo-chess set onboard the Millennium Falcon, to Rey living inside a wrecked AT-AT. There are a lot of these cameos of familiar motifs in the film, and it sometimes feels like a roll call of scenes we knew and loved from episodes IV–VI, but it satisfies the audience’s thrust for nostalgia.

There were a lot of nods to past films, but The Force Awakens is a story in its own right. The new characters have lives and adventures of their own and are not crowded out by classic Star Wars characters. Han Solo is the only returning character to play a major role and Harrison Ford does so with the grace and dignity of an elder statesman. This is in contrast to Lucas’ prequel trilogy, which relied too much on classic Star Wars characters - Obi-Wan, R2-D2, Yoda - and did not develop its own characters enough.

The other major flaw of the prequel trilogy was that it focused too much on the internal politics of the Jedi. The Old Republic’s priesthood/Gestapo were not as interesting as Lucas seemed to think they were and each prequel episode always came down to a lightsaber fight in the end. There was an absence of epic space battles or feats of dangerous piloting, which should be the meat and potatoes of any Star Wars films. The prequel trilogy lacked anything as exciting as the battle of Yavin at the end of episode IV.

This issue was addressed in The Force Awakens as Abrams brought the epic. There were huge battles aplenty. The escape from Jakku was a breathtaking scene, with the Millennium Falcon flying loop-the-loops and then racing through the husk of a crashed star destroyer, chased by tie fighters. My heart was in my throat the whole time. As it was during the attack on Takodana when rebel X-wings fly to rescue the heroes and Finn tries to use a lightsaber for the first time. The greatest achievement of the film is its climax, when the rebels attack the new uber-Death Star. It combines daring feats of flying, an intense ground assault and a good versus evil lightsaber showdown. In a phrase: perfect Star Wars.

This amazing sequence was ends with the tragic death of Han at the hands of his own son, Kylo Ren. It was a scene of genuine emotion. So many Star Wars deaths seem hollow, when the audiences does not care about the character, but Han has a special place in any fan’s heart and it was gutwrenching to see him go. Both Harrison Ford and Adam Driver played this scene superbly; it is the jewel in the crown of this film.

The Force Awakens ends with a setup for the next film and a lot of the questions this film raises are left unanswered. I am very excited for episode VIII in March 2017 and I hope it delivers on the promise of this one. J.J. Abrams did an excellent job, taking on one of the toughest directing gigs in Hollywood. He managed to walk the line between the originality this film needed to be a story in its own right and the nostalgia it needed to keep the fans happy. The weight of expectation was enormous and Abrams rose to the challenge ably.

Episode VII has lots of adventure, visual spectacle and epic space battles. This is what Star Wars is all about. This film has the energy and enthusiasm for the classic trilogy that the prequel trilogy was missing. I left The Force Awakens about as excited about Star Wars as I was when I was ten years old. I am now itching with anticipation for more Star Wars films in the future. My faith in the franchise has been restored.