Next week sees the much-hyped opening at London's 0 2 Arena of Star Wars: A Musical Journey , a multimedia celebration of one of the most popular franchises in cinema history. But celebration is the last thing we should be doing.

1 Cinema, overnight, became infantile.The first Star Wars film came out in 1977, in the middle of my undergraduate years. When I first went up to university, my new friends and I used to see Bergman double bills and discuss alienation in Antonioni. Cinema was a serious art form that dealt with the perplexing and troubling adult world awaiting us. After Star Wars , movie conversation addressed itself to spaceship chases and monsters with funny heads. It was suddenly cool to have the sensibility of a 12-year-old. Cinema never recovered. Neither did we.