Disappointingly, the night that Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens only one grown man is dressed as Darth Vader in the lobby of the sparkling new Odeon cinema in Charlestown, near Dublin Airport. Even more disappointingly, it's me.
As I stand tall, waving my light sabre in what I hope is a darkly foreboding fashion, people walk past looking anywhere but in my direction. It’s almost as if they’re mortified by the sight of a man reduced to wearing a sweaty nylon costume and an ill-fitting, entirely fogged-up mask.
A fellow cinema host – that’s what we ushers are called now – joins me in the lobby. He introduces himself as Luke.
“Luke!” I shriek, louder than I intend. I pause for a crucial beat before intoning, in as deep a voice as I can muster, “Luke, I am your father.” I’m delighted by my hilarity.
“Yeah, everyone’s been saying that for weeks,” Luke says, glumly. “I actually go by my surname here. Stobie.”
“What!” I say. “You’re Stobie-Wan Kenobi!
He wanders away, shaking his head. I divest myself of my sweaty costume faster than Magic Mike on steroids and follow Stobie (-Wan Kenobi) like an obedient droid as he leads me to the cash registers, where a crowd of Star Wars fans are milling around, waiting for popcorn.
Along with their names, all Odeon cinema hosts’ badges carry the title of their favourite film. “It’s nice, a real talking point,” Siobhán Carr, the cinema’s general manager, told me earlier, as my shift started. “You can tell a lot about someone from the films they like.”
As I'm here for one night only I've been given a different Conor's badge. My favourite film is suddenly Cast Away. As I serve nachos, people look at my name. And then at my film. I can see judgment in their eyes.
"We had our first Star Wars screening last night, at a minute past midnight," Carr says as she brings me from the popcorn section to the projection room.
The projection room. This is where the real magic happens, I think to myself.
“It was manic for the 40 minutes before the screening,” Carr continues. The huge iSense auditorium – bigger screen, bigger sound – was full for the midnight showing, “but at 3.15am there were only 12 people, and they had all stayed to watch the film a second time.”
The judgment is in my eyes this time.
"It's their Super Bowl, their all-Ireland final," she says in the uberfans' defence.
She takes me into projection room 9. I expect some kind of Cinema Paradiso moment. I want a wizened old man carefully spooling film as reels clickety-clack through his leathery hands. But there's no old man, just a huge computer server, a monitor and a silent movie projector.
“Oh, it’s all automatic now,” Carr says. “In the morning we turn on these bad boys, and then in the evening we turn them off. That’s all we have to do.”
I look crestfallen. “Did I ruin the magic for you?” she asks.
Yes.
Claudine Perry – favourite film Breakfast at Tiffany's – takes me on a walk through all nine screens, to make sure nobody is messing around. "It can be hard sometimes if people your own age are up to no good," she says. "They'll just look at you if you ask them to get off their phones. But we do get to see snippets of the movies."
Seven of the nine screens are showing Star Wars, and – spoiler alert – over 10 out-of-sequence minutes I learn that Han Solo makes a star turn as a Darth Vader-inspired drag queen and that BB-8 is sold into a life of brutal enslavement at a desert market for 60 portions of food.
Back in the lobby I meet Darren Wickham and his sister Sarah from Dunboyne. "I've been a big fan since I was a kid," he says as she nods. "My favourite movie is The Empire Strikes Back, but I'm hoping this will be my new favourite. I've been avoiding spoilers for so long. I haven't been on Twitter for three days, just in case I came across one."
Carr and I start checking tickets. “I see a few more women here tonight,” she says. “Last night it was an overwhelmingly male audience. I think I only saw four women out of more than 300 people.”
Jaanika Linde rushes up, all blond hair and breathlessness. She is, by some measure, the most glamorous person in the cinema. "Is it too late to see the 7.30 showing?" she asks. It's 7.45pm. "If you're quick about it you'll get in just in time," I say. I know this because the computer told me.
“I was planning to come with a friend,” she says. “But she decided to go shopping instead, so I came on my own.”
I mention that Star Wars is a particularly male phenomenon. "I think that's changing," she says. "Especially now that a lot of the lead actors are female. I love it anyway." And with that she's gone.
Stephen and his sister Sophie, who are nine and six, are standing by the pick’n’mix dressed as Sith. I ask why they have come as baddies.
“I kind of like the bad guys in movies,” Stephen says earnestly. “They’re much cooler.”
“We didn’t have the costumes for the other guys,” Sophie says honestly.
Cheryl Thompson arrives with her son Noah, who is five and has come as an Imperial Stormtrooper. "He is mad about Star Wars," she says as she scans the lobby anxiously. "I'm excited, too. I was forced to watch all six movies against my wishes, but eventually I got the gist of it. I really like them now."
She’s still scanning the lobby. “It’s his dad who’s the big fan. He got lost in the car park, though.”
Then Dad appears. His name is Declan O’Rourke, and he looks more excited than Noah. “He had a much better mask on earlier,” O’Rourke says. “He didn’t want to bring it, but. I had it on earlier, too. It was great.”
Thompson takes out her phone and shows me a photograph of father and son standing by a Christmas tree, looking like dark lords of a galaxy far, far away.
I ask O’Rourke how long he’s been a fan. “All my life, pal, all my life,” he says before chasing his son up the escalator.
