Warning: There are spoilers ahead. Only use this article in a seasonal argument if everyone in the room has seen the movie or cares to see it. Come on, it's Christmas.

There is a dangerous, delusionary deception doing the rounds in America this holiday season. You might encounter it around your family's Christmas table, and it is a good idea to be armed with the facts before you do.

We're not just talking about the Donald Trump presidential campaign. We're talking about the equally insane notion that Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) is a "remake" of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) hiding in plain sight.

Vox called the former "a baldfaced rip-off." Forbes opted for "glorified remake." The Verge said that without George Lucas' blessing it would be "universally derided as the thinnest, most obvious plagiarism" and also, bafflingly, called it "an alternate-universe version of A New Hope that just happens to be set in the same universe." Even the Vatican newspaper got in on the act, calling The Force Awakens a "confused and hazy reboot."

You'll hear a lot of the same on Twitter, much of it from people with eggs for avatars. It's a prime example of how a little Star Wars knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Let me explain by way of five questions for the "remake" crowd:

1. Have you seen the original?

You have? Great. Just wanted to make sure. Because that means you know it doesn't start with the massacre of a small village of innocents, doesn't end with the surprise discovery of a galactic hermit, doesn't have a vision sparked by a lightsaber at its exact centerpoint, right? I'm wondering in what way you see those plot-crucial moments existing in A New Hope.

Did we follow the daring escape of a random Stormtrooper in Darth Vader's legions? Because I don't remember that, either. Nor do I remember a woman in virtual serfdom being the main protagonist and focus of the Force. I do recall the bartender at the Mos Eisley Cantina being a thousand-year-old mystic who can see into your soul and drives the plot forward in important — no, wait, he was a surly dude who was racist about droids.

2. How well do you know Darth Vader?

Vader isn't the well-developed villain you remember in Star Wars; that only started to happen in The Empire Strikes Back. When filming in 1976, George Lucas was embarrassed by Vader. The scuba mask breathing of Ben Burtt and the deep rumbling tones of James Earl Jones were still unimagined. Lucas feared that his lesser villain (intentionally ranked below Tarkin) was not scary, and even asked the writer Alan Dean Foster to kill Vader off in the first post-movie novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye. (Thankfully, Foster kept him alive at the end of the novel.)

Vader, edited out to within an inch of his life, is on screen for less than 10 minutes. Don't believe me? My favorite way to demonstrate is simply to screen The Vader Sessions, an immortal piece of YouTube comedy genius that dubs other James Earl Jones movie lines over literally every single Vader line in A New Hope. You'll notice how quickly the makers ran out of material and had to resort to Billy Joel.

Kylo Ren, on the other hand, is front and center. We see him on screen, either masked or maskless, for a good quarter of the film, more than anyone but Rey. He is no Vader, and that is the whole point; though he worships his grandfather, he's much more complex and tortured, caught between poles of light and dark. (So much so that some people seem to think, based on little evidence, he may even be a Resistance spy.)

Beset by temper tantrums, afraid of Rey, Kylo manages to be both powerful and powerfully weak. Vader was just this guy in a killer helmet, you know?

3. Bro, do you even Star Wars?

You may rightly call many elements of The Force Awakens derivative. When it comes to Starkiller Base, I'm with you — simply making the same superweapon planet-sized and sun-powered is the source of all that is uneven about the last hour of the new film.

But when we do that, we also have to acknowledge that the entire Star Wars series is intentionally derivative of itself. This goes back to The Empire Strikes Back, which reprised Luke's Jedi training with Obi-Wan — using a creature who grew out of a version of the "Ben Kenobi" character in the third draft of "The Star Wars," as it then was. The derivative version ended up being better, and darker, with Luke's vision of facing Vader springing out of it.

Lucas learned a vital lesson: Keep iterating on the same ideas and you'll strike gold.

So the nods and echoes and rhymes began, and they never stopped. Return of the Jedi gave us the second Death Star, with a slightly more intricate path to its destruction. The prequels "rhyme" an insane amount with the original trilogy, to use Lucas' preferred word, and much criticism of those controversial movies can be put down to the attempt to make too many scenes rhyme.

Say what you like about J.J. Abrams, but there is no greater imitator of George Lucas than George Lucas.

4. Bro, do you even Joseph Campbell?

The Hero's Journey explained. Image: Wikimedia

Campbell, the world-famous scholar of myth and high priest of the principles on which Lucas grew the franchise, famously declared that there was only ever really one story on which every epic in world history was based. He dubbed it the hero's journey.

So when you say "remake," given all of the above, I have to think that it's because you're simply seeing two people, Luke and Rey, on the same eternal journey. (For that matter, you may be seeing parallels with Finn; The Force Awakens gives you two hero's journeys for the price of one.)

So yes, both Luke and Rey happen to be orphans on a desert planet who encounter droids. Both refuse the call to adventure, a key Campbell component, and it takes shocking murders (Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru for Luke, the entire Hosnian system for Rey) to scare them into it. But there the similarity ends; they take different paths on the same journey, right from the fact that one has family while the other has to live in a rusty AT-AT and scrub bits of machinery for food.

Spoiler alert: Every Star Wars trilogy is going to follow the arc of the hero's journey. As did every work of fiction from Gilgamesh to the Hunger Games. As will all the spin-off Star Wars movies.

Hey, I did warn you this story was full of spoilers.

5. Have you seen 'The Force Awakens' more than once?

Because it gets better. The callbacks fade away. Many questions are answered. You're watching in a more relaxed fashion. A lot went by in two hours and fifteen minutes, and it really takes more than one viewing to process.

This is quite intentional — and part of the reason for the ongoing success of this franchise. James Bond movies may recycle their plots to the director's content, but they're also far less likely to bring viewers back a second time.

The moment you go back to a Star Wars movie, you start seeing it in a different light. So perhaps it's time you got started.

Chris Taylor is the author of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe.

