Sorry Star Wars junkies, but the prequel for which you have been waiting for 16 years is not really for you. It's for your kids, or possibly your grandchildren.
The grown-up critics have been let in to see Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom before it reaches the public next Wednesday and they are disappointed. It's "too young-themed", "too young-friendly", they fret.
A few teenagers were let in to get reaction. For one 16-year-old, "as a science fiction film it was excellent. But as a Star Wars film? No." Another said, "I was really hoping to like it more."
Yet the air is full of discussion about Freudian symbols, Jungian archetypes, spiritual voids, healing mythologies. It all sounds a bit heavy for the kids. George Lucas, the onlie begetter of this inter-galactic mumbo-jumbo has a serious purpose, he says.
He wants his movies to make us ask the big questions: "Why are we here? Is there anybody or anything out there that has a relationship to us? Where do we go when we die?"
This must explain why dedicated fans have been queuing for up to six weeks to get tickets for the most hyped movie of the century. This dedication strikes others as looney.
The universe is being divided into two kinds of people, the Washington Times reports. Those who love the idea of the new trilogy from George Lucas and all the hype and memorabilia that go with it; and those "who think people in the first group need psychiatric help".
Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, where Star Wars premiered back in 1977, is where the real devotees will be next Wednesday. Last week, after queuing for six weeks, they each got their 14 tickets. Frank Blankenship, a 23year-old computer technician, who was number two in the queue, explained that he "grew up with Star Wars toys - they were the only toys my parents would buy. This is a cult experience."
An "estimated two million employees" will skip work across America for the first day's showing. Will it be worth it if they get sacked? Of course.
I wonder about the thousands who have been queuing for weeks. Have they no jobs in this booming economy?
And will Liam Neeson keep his job for Episode Two? As everyone knows, he plays Qui-Gon Jinn, a Jedi master who recognises that the Force is in nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker.
He will grow up to be our old friend Darth Vader in the first Star Wars back in 1977. Remember how he did in Alec Guinness - sorry Obi Wan-Kenobi, with a fluorescent tube - sorry, a lightsaber? Liam got into deep doodoo, as George Bush would say, when he announced in a recent interview with Redbook magazine that "I'm retiring from movies next year."
"Honest to God," he confided, "I don't want to do it anymore. I'm not happy doing it. Film is a director's medium, it has nothing to do with actors.
"We are basically puppets, walking around, hitting marks, saying lines. Producers earn all the money and you get the sense that they hate actors."
Later, Liam said he was "only joking". Of course.
The critics found Liam as QuiGon a "sombre Jedi knight", a "sad, stately samurai". A critic sympathised that "poor, dull Neeson must play foil for an infantile, alien side-kick named Jar Jar Binks".
Playing beside Jar Jar would drive you out of films. He is described as a "frog-faced galoot" who speaks incomprehensible English with a Caribbean accent.
Another critic calls him a "goofy, floppy-eared, vest-wearing toy serpent with a clumsy twolegged lope".
If this turns you on, you can buy Jar Jar underwear somewhere near you as the Phantom Menace accessories are now pouring into the shops.
The baddie in all this is Darth Maul, the Dark Lord of Sith, who is pursuing Queen Amidala of the Eden-like Naboo planet. Bill Moyers, who used to be Lyndon Johnson's press secretary and now makes serious documentaries about religion, found Darth Maul a "mesmerising figure".
In an interview with George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars and its sequels and prequels, Mr Moyers said that Darth Maul, with his satanic make-up, red contact lens and horns, made him think of Lucifer in Paradise Lost or the devil in Dante's Inferno. "He's the Evil Other - but with powerful human traits." Asked what emotion he feels when he looks at his satanic creation, Mr Lucas replied: "Fear. You wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley.
"But he's not repulsive. He's something you should be afraid of, without his being a monster whose intestines have been ripped out and thrown all over the screen."
That's a relief. Just horns but no intestines. He also has rotting teeth.