SPACE ODYSSEY: (From top) Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker in a scene from Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith; the mask of Darth Vader; a scene from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

My neighbour, Pol-tiuhaal Darh, is a retired Jedi Knight. I see him every now and then, standing on his balcony using the Force to telekinetically steal fruits from street vendors. His lightsabre, once used for slicing up the evil minions of the Dark Side, is now mostly used as an emergency light, during powercuts. He’s a lonely, bitter man.

Sometimes he tells me there’s nothing he wants to see more than a Death Star destroyer ship pointing its giant laser cannon and making ominous whirring sounds as it prepares to blow our planet up into tiny little bits. I ask him if he’d mind if the ship that destroyed our planet was, instead, part of a lumpy yellow Vogon constructor fleet building an interstellar bypass.

Pol-tiuhaal (Poltu to friends) seems OK with that idea. So I suggest that his apocalypse fetish might be temporarily tickled if he accompanied me to a multiplex next change, to watch either Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ? both films that are zooming our way at the speed of light. Yes, a grey-bearded robed man isn’t the ideal movie date, but the advantage of taking Poltu to theatres is that with mind-control powers, you never need to buy tickets.

I have to admit though, that as the initial credits are rolling for either of these movies, I’ll be sending up a prayer to the Force that rules movies. ‘Please, please, get it right this time,’ I’ll be whispering. Because both Hitchhiker’s and Sith might turn out to be gigantic space turkeys, and I really don’t want to be in the news as the partner in crime of a pushed-over-the-edge Jedi Knight running amok. Call it a lily-livered distaste for scattered bloody limbs.

And my concerns about the films alone run fairly deep too, because I’m a huge victim of Adaptation Anxiety. Do you have that feeling as well ? when a book you love and have read hundreds of times gets adapted into a film, you don’t really want to see the film because it’ll never live up to the movie in your head? I had to be prodded constantly to keep my eyes open during the Lord of the Rings films ? though I have to say that was a good thing in the end, because the films were as epic as the original. But how on earth is the film version of Hitchhiker’s Guide going to capture the effervescent, satirical and constantly surprising tone of the book?

With Star Wars, it’s a lot easier, because the Big MacMyth of filmdom has perfected the art of drawing huge audiences with no expectations at all beyond mind-boggling special effects. It must be fun being George Lucas. Even if the films are complete turkeys (like the last two, where the most engaging human character was Natalie Portman’s stomach) they’re guaranteed instantaneous pop-culture iconic status.

The four dread Sith Lords named Darth Marketing, Promotions, Publicity and Merchandising will have taken care of that ? Poltu tells me that Star Wars draws more Google hits than The Bible and Jesus combined, and that thousands of people in the UK entered ‘Jedi Knight’ in the last online religion census. The franchise is six films old now, with more cartoons, TV shows and games on their way ? in space, no one can hear you scream “Enough!” What’s remarkable is that the most interesting characters in the entire series are, in order, a man with a black bucket on his head, a green midget with a serious grammar problem, and a beeping tin can, and the dialogue and acting are consistently woodier than Woody the woodpecker.

“Stop being so critical,” pipes in Poltu. “The films are made for children.” All right, so forget the over-simplified politics and the fumbling, adolescent human relationships (as in Lord of the Rings, that other eternal geek favourite, the real aliens are women). But the Harry Potter series has shown it’s possible to make films for children without compromising on interesting characters and tight storylines. “But Potter is fiction. Star Wars is real,” chimes in my friendly neighbourhood Jedi.

Right. These are difficult times for filmmakers who hope that special effects alone can carry a film ? audiences, especially younger audiences, have seen it all already. Lightsabres and space dogfights, however spectacular, will be assimilated nonchalantly with another crunch of popcorn.

Today’s geek has options aplenty, and will invariably head for more challenging franchises. And the new Star Wars series has offered nothing so far that lives up to the pioneering spirit of the first three films. The Phantom Menace lost me when the first words, scrolling across space, came up ? they talked about a tax dispute!

What happened to ‘A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away?’ It’s an interesting case ? Lucas is a man whose own ambitions are of epic proportions, and whose creations, ILM and Pixar, are at the very forefront of special effects technology ? yet this is the man who created Jar-Jar Binks, who even on a good day makes Johnny Lever look like Charlie Chaplin. Don’t tell Poltu I said this, though ? Lucas-da is apparently a storehouse of the Force, and any insult to him ? or Jar-Jar, a close personal friend of Poltu’s ? could get me killed.

Revenge of the Sith is apparently better than the last two films (like that’s difficult) and the storyline seems promising ? Anakin Skywalker joins the Dark Side of the Force, becomes Darth Vader, and takes on Obi-Wan Kenobi, presumably siring Luke somewhere along the way.

Millions of movie fans worldwide will be staring in fascination at the screen on May 19, and we’ll be there too. At the very worst, it can’t be worse than The Matrix Revolutions, can it?

Four beers later, I’m lying in the middle of a field with a towel, watching the stars and waiting for a green Betelgeuse trading ship to take me away from ‘the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the galaxy’. Or at least waiting for Douglas Adams, no doubt watching over me benignly from Magathrea, to inspire me with some kind of great idea.

Nope. Nothing. Let’s just talk about the movie, then.

For any Adams fan, the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie is a complex new kettle of Babel fish. Consider the mythology of the original Guide; low-budget in origin, indefinable in form (it’s a book, a radio series, a TV show, a play and a towel), it’s got the potential to be a universe of delight as a film. While the heroes of Star Wars run around being righteous and noble until they’re blue in the face (it helps that some have blue faces to start with) the themes of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are fairly simple ? life is absurd, and the answer to everything is 42. And this rollicking spirit is precisely what’s causing my huge Adaptation Anxiety attacks ? the LOTR films captured my imagination with their sheer scale and authenticity, but how can you capture a book that’s so slippery and elusive in the first place?

The human cast of Star Wars never has to act anyway, so there’s no cause for concern there, and the cast of Hitchhiker’s Guide (Martin Freeman as Dent, Sam Rockwell as the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox ? will he do a good job? Can anyone? ? not to mention Alan Rickman as Marvin the paranoid android and Stephen Fry as the Guide’s voice) sounds excellent ? just the sort of hoopy froods you’d like to go on a ramble around the Galaxy with.

But I’m still worried ? making a Hollywood film based on Hitchhiker’s sounds like, as a critic once said of writing about Wodehouse, taking a spade to a souffl?. And critics abroad have already taken pickaxes to this film. The humour of the book appears dated, they say, and the mixed-bag inter-continental actors have problems interpreting the humour, which is very firmly British. Besides, the pace of the book, which jumps across stars faster than a Star Wars jet on hyperdrive, is very difficult to match on screen. But then, critics say a lot of things.

The immediate challenge for the Hitchhiker film will be matching the standards set by that other comic space opera, Galaxy Quest, which lampooned sci-fi, its characters and even its fans in a format better suited to film than the picaresque Guide. Will this movie manage? There’s anxiety attack no. 22. Don’t Panic.

To distract me, and keep me alive until our movie date, Poltu’s arrived, complete with lightsabre and fake green hairy ears. “Don’t do Yoda. Please don’t do Yoda,” I murmur weakly, but I’m not forceful enough to stop Master Darh. Whose sage words of advice, just before I pass out, are: “Panic don’t. Fear and anger panic causes. To the Dark Side they lead. Interfere with the movie-watching experience they will. Just watch the movie go. And cheap don’t be, tickets you this time buy.”