In the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris declares that sci-fi movies are in trouble, that they’re not giving us any new ideas and are in fact too nostalgic and derivative. Harris himself is saying nothing new — Blade Runner director Ridley Scott expertly stated this last summer at the Venice Film Festival — but I applaud his solution and his call for someone to rise to the occasion and save the genre from itself:

Perhaps science fiction needs to be saved from the very people who love it the most. Nostalgia for a form can be annihilating to creativity, so while its devotees are swamped in their own canon, trying to mine now-sacred texts for any new material, I wish a great writer or director with no particular affection for the genre would let his imagination loose and see what it yields. It happened 40 years ago, when Stanley Kubrick, following his own ice-cold muse and his fascination with science itself, decided he wanted to create something that ”extended the range of science fiction,” a genre that didn’t particularly impress him. What nerve! The result was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which changed the game so completely that in movies, the sci-fi genre immediately vanished for a few years while everyone surveyed an irrevocably altered landscape.

What great filmmaker of today seems the least likely to make a sci-fi film? Personally, I can’t think of any director that reliable or that innovative. And that’s probably a good thing, because the person who tackles this task should be that unthinkable. Whoever it is, though, should take a look at the films of — or even recruit as a collaborator — Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter), the closest we have to someone doing something fresh with the genre. Fessenden has some glaring weaknesses in his execution that a better director could possibly hone to perfection. However, he does have some of those new ideas we’re looking for.

One of the important things to factor in, though, is that even Kubrick had help. Whoever is going to make the attempt at saving sci-fi needs his or her own Arthur C. Clarke, or at least a great team of futurists — though a look at Spielberg’s aides on Minority Report suggests that even the futurists are looking at too many of the ideas of yesteryear. I’m sure skeptical that anyone can pull it off, but Harris has at least made me excited about the chance of this happening.