Just for the record:

• My view of the prequels is precisely that of every rational person, even though I only saw one of them.
• I saw each of the first three movies when they came out, and found them sometimes entertaining but mostly kinda boring, and to this day I fail to understand the loyalty and affection they inspire.
• I think J. J. Abrams movies tend to be clever but soulless.
• So I came to The Force Awakens with extremely low expectations, which it met.

So Rey finds Luke’s lightsaber in Maz Kanata’s basement, and the second she touches it she receives a series of visions from its past. And as soon as I saw that I thought: Priori Incantatem. Not exactly, of course, but the principle seems to be similar: the weapon contains memories of its former owners, the way that wands in Harry Potter’s world contain memories of the spells cast with them.

And sure enough, the rest of the story strongly implies that Rey is in some sense the rightful custodian of that lightsaber. That she is able to wrest control of it from Emo Kylo Ren — the world’s first weepy millennial I-just-don’t-know-my-true-calling supervillan — could be attributed to her superior strength in the Force, but more likely to its belonging to her and not to him. So are lightsabers in this rebooted universe like wands in the Potterverse? Do they in some sense choose the wizard — um, I mean, the Jedi? Do have some kind of special bond with their rightful owners?

Or is that true of just this particular weapon? If so, maybe we have a different analogue. I imagine a line cut from the movie in which Maz Kanata says to Rey, “This lightsaber wanted to be found … and by you.”