If you placed a lightsaber in the hands of director JJ Abrams, it would glow blue.

His new Star Wars film is a fine spacecraft, a blockbuster that knows its place. The hunt in this Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens might ostensibly be for the vanished Luke Skywalker, but — be not fooled —  the flight plans for this gigantic motion picture only ever point to one destination: nostalgia. This is the grandest and most unashamed throwback of them all, a Star Wars film that triggers love for the original Star Wars trilogy by, well, belting out a cover version of the George Lucas classic. The band fronted by Abrams is, thankfully, a talented cover band and they do an entertaining enough job hitting familiar notes in order to take the song to new generations — but the song remains the same.

So much the same, in…