The Worst Thing about Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Seeing it with other people

It's under a month to go until the launch of Star Wars: This One Will Be Good, Promise, and the internet is about ready to burst. The last month or so has seen a flood of trailers, TV spots, trading cards, posters, photoshoots, and various other marketing materials, so much so that it wouldn't surprise if Starkiller Base doesn't in fact make a sun go supernova, it just blankets planets with Star Wars stuff until they grind to a halt. I'm not saying that the excitement is at fever pitch quite yet – there's still a little while to go, still yet more cheap nostalgia to be cranked on – but one more advert with Han Solo at the fore and there'll be people crying in the street, and not just because Harrison Ford looks like a confused old woman.

Even the most jaded of moviegoers would admit there's excitement in the air, even if that excitement is based on the cruel but satisfying hope that it'll be so mind-rendingly rubbish that children will bawl openly, and grown men and women will fight each other to publish the first 'come back George, all is forgiven' thinkpiece. Even those burned by the simply unconscionable prequel trilogy are starting to warm to the fact that, hey, this one looks alright. (As an aside: they all looked alright. Episode I's trailer is still the most exciting thing in the world, even when you know the movie it takes all this footage from is, frankly, a disaster.)

So far, so good then. But there's just one problem with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and that's the fact that – unless you're a billionaire, or, erm, George Lucas – come December 17th you'll likely be cramming into a theater with a bunch of the ghastliest people who ever lived.

Now this may seem a little over the top, but have you been to a cinema in the last, say, twenty years? No matter the film, no matter the rating, it is always, without exception, RAMMED with bastards.* Said bastards come in many forms, like character classes in online shooters, each working with (or sometimes against) each other to ruin the effect of sitting in a dark room and pretending to be somewhere completely different.

The most obvious of these scum is The Talker. Talkers are, of course, the bane of the movie going experience. I once went to a matinee screening of The Fountain, tickets for which were both incredibly hard to come by and paid for with wheelbarrows of cash, and the people next to me were still talking over the opening. Think about that for a second: these people paid hard cash to actively undermine their own evenings. I bet they like video games.

The Talker, of course, is not just confined to the shores of Aronofsky wank-fests about the meaning of life and death. The Talker is the foot soldier of annoyance, found everywhere, all the time. The Talker is behind you, explaining to their friends what's going to happen next (they saw the movie online last week). The Talker is next to you, across the aisle, discussing the relative worth of Nando's chips versus rice. The Talker wonders, aloud and in multi-part discussions, where they should go later. The Talker, no matter where they physically sit, is everywhere, their voice carrying, a bugle horn of obnoxiousness rendered in human form.

The Talker is just the frontline, however, the stormtrooper taking heat while more specialised weaponry gets into position. The Rustler, for example, has to be close to annoy its target, but does so with maximum effectiveness once it closes the distance. Crisp packets, bags, coats, popcorn, anything will be co-opted. I watched Zero Dark Thirty in theatres, and the man behind me kept producing yet more donuts from a Lidl carrier bag, the sort of donuts which come in little plastic trays which make a creaking sound like a Final Girl hiding in a wardrobe from a horror movie slasher. This guy, it seemed, was a professional: not an oblivious Rustler, like some people. He had a plan, and executed it. Who knows how long he'd been doing this for.

There are other types: The Shuffler, those that simply cannot sit still, or are up and down in front of the screen like it's a giant workout video, albeit one bizarrely starring Al Pacino of Brendan Gleeson. The Parent, who lets their kids just wander around, including, in one instance, a fucking infant, crawling up and down the stairs. There are more, but you get the point.

Perhaps worse than the reality of these beasts, however, is the anticipation of their arrival, a state of heightened awareness of everyone coming into the room before the movie starts that makes sitting down for what should be a couple of hours of escapism a lesson in anxiety. Scanning every face, every couple, every group, seeing what they're holding. Is that a gallon-bag of crisps? Is that popcorn? Is that a – oh my word it fucking is – a Slushie? 'Are those...trainers', you shriek inwardly, hand rising quickly to the edge of your mouth like a Victorian debutante, wondering if it'll all be OK. Time passes: maybe it will. Then, suddenly, like the Terminator rising out of the ashes of a burned-out truck, you go slack with horror and mental exhaustion as a group of 15 year olds comes in, sits in front of you, and proceeds to have a total lad-off for the duration. Every single time.

Then there's a whole world of other, non-dickhead related problems: is this screen big enough? Why am I not seeing it in IMAX? Wait, this is IMAX. But is it the biggest IMAX? Why didn't I book the biggest one? Oh shit, what if the good seats are all sold out? What if the projector totally fucks it halfway through, like when I watched American Splendor and this happened but because it was American Fucking Splendor I thought it was part of the show? What if the projectionist forgets to adjust the ratio after the curtains part that little bit more? Worse: what if the trailers are wank?

It's interminable, it really is. There are simply too many obstacles to a good cinema experience, unless you're watching at two in the afternoon on a Monday three weeks after it came out, and even then, the building will probably fall down or something. So good luck at Star Wars. You'll need it.

*(Actually, there was one exception to this, and that was 2004's Torque, a movie so hilari-bad that only three people were in the screening, including me and my friend.)