The flip side of the apocalyptic evolution-and-destiny concerns of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's previous foray across the Last Frontier, The Martian is a feelgood take on the theme of space travel. Having landed the first astronauts on Mars in 2029, NASA is pursuing its Ares programme to establish a self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet. However, a calamitous storm forces the NASA crew to evacuate, leaving behind botanist Mark Watney, seemingly killed by flying debris.

This is the first feature by writer-director Stephen Fingleton, and has earned him a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut. Set in Fingleton's native Northern Ireland, it's a pared-down tale of post-apocalyptic struggle, compensating for its lack of budget with rigorous economy and a watchful intelligence.

It’s 2016, and The X-Files is the most popular TV show in the world. The very idea that over 20 million people in the US would tune in to a new episode of the pioneering sci-fi drama 14 years after the last one might seem as preposterous as the conspiracy theories the show put forward in its later years, but it was probably more likely than fans in the UK hanging on for the fortnight it took for the new episodes to show up on Channel 5.

“It's true,” Harrison Ford’s Han Solo explains with wonder. “All of it.” The original Star Wars trilogy, its heroes and the Force have become fading folk tales for the new trilogy’s young tyros. 1977 is itself a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away and Star Wars: The Force Awakens has arrived to save a saga which has had nothing to replenish its deep reserves of generational goodwill since the decent bits of Return of the Jedi in 1983. Everyone who needs to be is still around and able to lift a light sabre. It’s possible for JJ Abrams to properly resume the tale abandoned then, and to repair the damage done by George Lucas’s misbegotten prequels.

Indeed Lucas, having sold his legacy to Disney, has been shut out of it, his own outlines for episodes seven to nine, vaguely promised since the Seventies, unceremoniously binned. Lawrence Kasdan, who with the screenwriter of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, Leigh Brackett, gave The Empire Strikes Back dark drama and Forties Hollywood wisecracking romance, is the keeper of the flame chosen by Abrams to co-write this. The Empire Strikes Back is the film it most resembles, with its sense of good in awful danger and evil unexpectedly ascendant. But from the Tatooine-like desert planet on which we begin to the tortured interplay of the Force’s light and dark sides in new villain Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, pictured below), the narrative and tone of all three original films are deliberately tapped into.Disney and Abrams have kept their pot of gold under wraps admirably till now, and the pleasure of a major Hollywood film which hasn’t had its good bits gutted for trailers should be preserved. But it won’t hurt you to know the new young cast are excellent. Unknown Briton Daisy Ridley’s Rey is the Luke Skywalker figure as we first met him, a working-class rural orphan on a backwater planet, collecting scrap and dreaming of being a pilot.

Finn (another young Briton, John Boyega, pictured below with Ridley) fulfils Han Solo’s reluctant hero role in extremis, as a morally conflicted stormtrooper (there’s only one – the others have their Nazi roots reaffirmed as the Empire-replacing First Order unfurls its red and black banners, and are blown away with the usual untroubled elan). Oscar Isaac, so good as the Coens’ Llewyn Davis, is dashing resistance pilot Poe Dameron, taking on Luke and Han’s swashbuckling elements.And then, there’s Han Solo. Harrison Ford’s box-office power ended a decade ago, but his return to a role whose corny lines he threatened to stuff down George Lucas’s throat in 1977 reminds you he is a great movie star. He has the confident, reluctantly sensitive masculinity and now weathered, craggy looks for the mixture of Bogart and Errol Flynn Han demands. As when Abrams gave Leonard Nimoy his last role in his headspinningly satisfying Star Trek reboot, this further adventure of Han, and a new scene in his star-crossed romance with Carrie Fisher’s weary Leia, make this film real for those who care. As to Luke Skywalker, he’s around.

Star Wars famously opened with the cinema-shaking Dolby rumble of an Imperial Star Destroyer crossing the screen. The effects which were a marvel then are a sometimes beautiful means to an emotional end now. The commercial juggernaut which at my screening filled 25 minutes with Duracell-powered light-sabres and the like has been ignored as much as possible, Abrams, Kasdan and their cast instead breathe new life into something they’ve tried not to think of as a franchise.In 1977, George Lucas created Star Wars, brilliantly, as a tribute to the simple Saturday morning adventure serials of his childhood (and The Searchers, and Kurosawa, and Tolkien...). It was as personal and fresh as the rest of the otherwise morally nuanced, adult New Hollywood it climaxed and killed. We’ve been living in the infantilised fallout ever since, where giving Iron Man some good lines is the best you can hope for from a blockbuster.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens won’t have any wider impact. It has been built to serve and sell to different audiences. Some with no memory of being swept away almost forty years ago will follow strong new heroes and villains. For those old enough now and young enough then to have childhoods consumed by this stuff, it’s a satisfying new turn in a near life-long tale.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens

From the sublime, to the mundane. Last week's insane Metal Gear Solid V gives way to this freeroaming action-adventure cash-in on the Mad Max: Fury Road film. But a threadbare plot and far too much back-and-forth in play does this game no favours. Particularly in comparison to the other big action game out this week.

A tidy, English village. Swings hang in the breeze, a bicycle's discarded by a phone box, smoke curls over an ashtray in the pub garden. But no one's here. No one's ever coming back.

Don’t on any account be late for the first couple of minutes of the woolly mammoth that is Russian director Alexei German’s last film, Hard to Be a God, since the opening narrative voiceover gives a rare suggestion of explanatory background to a work that, put mildly, does not greatly trouble itself, over a lumbering length of just under three hours, with much in the way of plot explication.

Urban streets are littered with bodies. Barricades constructed from cars are ablaze. The national broadcaster works behind security suitable for a prison camp, Fearful old people live communally in underground warrens. Gangs roam cities, while in the countryside the hippy-like Planet People chant and wander, looking for sites from where they can ascend to salvation on another, mythical planet.

With its teeny tiny protagonist Ant-Man joins a movie tradition that includes The Incredible Shrinking Man, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Innerspace. And yet the 12th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels like a fresh perspective on the modern blockbuster, where bigger certainly hasn't always meant better. A miniature superhero might not seem hugely useful in the fight against contemporary cinema's monolithic threats but, in its surveillance and espionage themes and heist plot, Ant-Man does a sterling job of selling its premise.

Oh Arnie. For two terms Arnold Schwarzenegger retooled himself as the Governator who could save California from debt, drought and Democrats. By the time his term ended, the Californian exchequer was reduced to rubble. A bit, in fact, like the Golden Gate bridge at the start of Terminator: Genisys. When the Terminator said he’d be back he wasn’t wrong. But this time he’s leading a project that’s only pretending to destroy California’s infrastructure.