The most have-an-opinioned film of the year – Episode 7 – is certainly one I don’t want to have an opinion about. In my defense, I have only the slightest one. It, like the vast majority of studio films this year, was unmemorable at best and unmemorable at worst, consumed and evacuated without a second of trouble to the tract. Were it not for our expectations, their hype and its progenitor’s reputation, it would not exist. I told you it would be forgettable and you don’t remember.

What remain in the memory are the ads, which I get only to see now in cinemas. No surprise here, there were three, count that high if you dare ’em, three Star Wars tie-ins before the film: Duracell, HP and Colissismo (this last being an extremely corrupt, expensive, and slow version of UPS). Yes, we’re seeing ads for the product while we’re consuming it, but this is so un-new that I’ve already discussed it. And if I’m doing it, you know it’s been done.

No, The Star Wars Moment was not a tie-in, but the exquisite instant when I realized that the ad for Paco Rabane (curiously not a tie-in) was accompanied in real life by the very intense smell of BO, intensified by the consecutive days of packed audiences in the same cinema.

This ironic scratch and sniff is generally how I feel about Episode 7, with the reality and the fantasy not so much better than one another. Don’t get me wrong, Star Wars (4) is a pretty good movie, and certainly one that redefined cinema forever. What we feel today are its echoes, which would be fine as long as we didn’t keep calling those echoes sounds and reselling them as vinyl at thirty bucks a pop.

Episode 7 is the movie that somehow plagiarizes itself in real time. It’s like watching Galaxy Quest if Galaxy Quest was the movie for Galaxy Quest. No I have no idea what that means, and yet I know it’s correct and so do you.

One could say that copying and remaking is good (like Evil Dead 2) or bad (Episode 7), but it’s really just efficient. This is risk management cinema, something that Mr. JJ Abrams has, well, you can’t perfect risk-management, but you can mediate it. And he mediates the hell out of it. Again, too strong. He mediates the purgatory out of it.

A non-existent experience that I write about only about having just seen the how-could-it-be-worse-I’ll-show-you-fucking-how Episode 8. As 8′s greatest crime is to cause us to think warmly of 7, 7’s crime is to cause us to reevaluate Episodes 1-3.

Episode 7 is a better film, and there was must celebration, or at least vague relief. Or least vague something or other. Who can say who the who is that sentence?

But 7 has nothing inside it. Episodes 1-3 are terrible, sans any type of story or character, and a teachable example on how not to write a story/be an insane racist.

Nevertheless, they are the product of a madman. Who else would think that Jar-Jar Binks was a good idea, or a four hour sand race, or midichlorians, or casting Hayden Christiansen? Episode 7 exists, and kudos, but has nothing about hating sand, or skin-crawling romance, or a sabre toothed cat swipe that turns Ms. Portman’s unitard into a half shirt. Episodes 1-3 are the world’s most expense Ed Wood film. And you know what?

We still watch Ed Wood.