The Star Wars film series created by George Lucas has become one of the most successful franchises in the history of cinema, and the latest film, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, is out this month. The fourth film, Star War Episode I – The Phantom Menace, was released in 1999, and was the first of three prequels to the original trilogy. The film starred Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman, and grossed $924,317,558 worldwide.

Here is the Telegraph's original review by Booker Prize-nominated novelist Andrew O'Hagan, published on July 15, 1999.

When I was a boy – oh yes – a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... we used to bother our mothers for telescopes, and beg the Baby Jesus for another five minutes of The Twilight Zone.

Another programme on TV at the time was called Space 1999: it offered a madly innocent, sticky-back-plastic vision of the intergalactic future, and we seized as many episodes as we could, swallowing them down with endless sachets of some horrendous erupting sherbet called Space Dust. We wondered at the technological wizardry involved in making a plastic man's eyes go from side to side. And then came Star Wars.