From a galaxy far, far away to the Speciality Cinema, Star Wars is as much a part of Bermuda’s Christmas this year as cassava pie, eggnog and the boat parade.

The relaunched but pleasingly scruffy and unrefurbished Millennium Falcon is clearly the most keenly anticipated, seasonal flying object to arrive here since Santa’s sleigh made its first appearance in the Island’s skies.

Just have a gander at the endless queues for Star Wars: The Force Awakens snaking out of the Hamilton theatre on to Church Street if you want confirmation.

Bermuda audiences are proving to be highly receptive to the reawakened — and how! — power of the Star Wars mythology.

“We’ve officially owned the business for eight years and in the eight years I have never seen the demand for a movie like this,” said Giovanna Easton, who operates the theatre with husband Shandon.

And there’s also a neat local tie-in to the new film for those who care about such things: British actress Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, the heroine Jedi-in-waiting, has two Bermudian half-sisters.

Bermuda’s experience, of course, mirrors the frenzied international response to The Force Awakens.

The new film shattered box-office records worldwide on its opening weekend, with an estimated $528 million in global ticket sales.

The reviews, online chatter and word of mouth for The Force Awakens have all been as stellar as the box-office takings.

Its debut has instantly re-established the space fantasy saga — mothballed a decade ago after three bloodless prequels to the original 1977-1983 films — as an international phenomenon and a beloved pop culture touchstone.

The cynics, of course, scoff that the new film is nothing more than a 2½-hour commercial for toys and other merchandise.

They contend that it is a bright, shining, space-age lure expertly crafted to part the gullible, the sentimental and the nostalgic from their money.

And there’s no doubt that Star Wars is as much a marketing juggernaut as a movie series, particularly now the franchise has been absorbed into the Disney organisation — a corporation some critics see as the “Evil Empire” of overly relentless branding and merchandising strategies.

With its unrivalled cross-generational appeal and resuscitated cachet, The Force Awakens will almost certainly generate more revenue from the sale of battery-operated lightsabers, clothes, computer games and the like than it earns at the box office.

But the detractors need to stop and ask themselves why Star Wars is in fact resonating across all demographic, cultural and socioeconomic categories.

The film is exerting the gravitational attraction of a “Death Star”. And this clearly owes to more than simply rebooting and glossily repackaging a once-redoubtable franchise fallen upon hard times for 21st-century audiences (while featuring enough nostalgia-inducing business to draw in middle-aged fans of the originals).

The Force Awakens is tapping into something primal and fundamental in the audience’s psyches.

And this is because it boasts the same mythological dynamics of the earliest films in the series. Like all good myths, it is speaking to the mind and heart in a way that logic and philosophy never can.

Back in the early 1970s, George Lucas, the Star Wars writer/director/presiding genius, raided the junkyards of popular culture and jury-rig his saga of a farm boy-turned-galactic saviour out of scrap.

The original Star Wars was bolted together every bit as haphazardly as the Millennium Falcon. Splicing together elements of Japanese samurai films and Errol Flynn swashbucklers, Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp fiction and Jack Kirby comic books, Hollywood and spaghetti westerns, 1930s cliffhangers and stiff-upper-lip British wartime dramas, the film was an entirely unlikely mélange of influences and styles.

But just like Han Solo’s battered and endlessly patched-up interstellar blockade runner, the engine that propelled this potential hunk of space junk proved to be of matchless power.

For to give structure to the mismatched components that he had scavenged, Lucas employed precisely the same narrative technique that makes fairy stories and folk tales so enduring: an orphaned hero, a wizard mentor, an enchanted sword, an imprisoned princess, a sinister lord, a seemingly impregnable fortress, a magical victory.

Depending upon inspired guesswork and luck rather than any firm grasp of classical mythology (most of his characters owe more to the stock B-movie stereotypes from his childhood than to actual mythical archetypes), Lucas nevertheless created what amounted to a fairytale for our times.

The first film and its immediate sequel drew on such universal themes as struggle and conflict, sacrifice and redemption, heroism and hope.

More than just standard Hollywood morality tales kitted out with space-opera trappings, they gave voice to universal values and truths.

Lucas, as one academic has said, constructed out of discarded bits and pieces of pop culture “a new mythology which satisfied the emotional needs of both children and adults ... in a machine world drained of spiritual values, a world in which the individual felt impotent and alien”.

These films provided for a renewal of faith in ourselves and in our hopes about the future.

Hence the near-universal appeal of the best films in the series, including The Force Awakens, which returns to the mythical themes and motifs that undergirded Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, but were largely abandoned for the later, more unsatisfactory instalments.

And now that the filmmakers have rediscovered the real guiding force of Star Wars, it seems likely the series from a galaxy far, far away will be with us for a very, very long time to come.