In his Guardian review of Looper last Friday, Peter Bradshaw described Rian Johnson’s new film as ‘a gripping time travel sci-fi thriller’ and insisted that he left the press screening ‘dizzy with excitement.’

All as if the ideas and ambience and even the visuals of this movie hadn’t been tried and repeated and trotted out again and again for the past, what, thirty years?

I was looking forward to Looper (same way I was looking forward to Prometheus, I suppose). I came out of it just over an hour ago, fuming. Sadly, I was not dizzy with excitement, I was bored and pissed off.

I mean, seriously, could they not get any more rapid-action machine gun fire into that film?

I guess it’s me that’s the idiot here. I went into a pointless, high-concept Hollywood action thriller expecting thoughtful SF. Stupid mistake to make. No matter that Rian Johnson’s first movie, Brick, was a joy and a near-masterpiece. We’ve all seen what Hollywood money can do to talent – just go away and compare Memento with Inception. Was The Adjustment Bureau not enough to teach me a lesson? Was Source Code?

We’ve all seen Paul Kincaid’s excellent and insightful essay in the LA Review of Books, in which he argues that science fiction is ‘exhausted.’ It’s a great piece, a specific application and update of Joanna Russ’s 1971 essay ‘The Wearing Out of Genre Materials’, and every reader, writer and reviewer of SF should read and consider it. Whilst grinding my teeth in the cinema auditorium this evening, it couldn’t fail to attract my notice that Kincaid’s arguments might easily be applied to SF cinema as well as books.

It’s well known that there’s nothing truly new under the sun, that there are only seven basic story plots, or eight, or five, or whatever it is. But there are or at least there should be new approaches, original ways of seeing familiar things, an attitude that if not novel is at least personally resonant and emotionally real.

Off-the-peg films like Looper, which reiterate all the old genre stereotypes in the most middle-of-the-road way possible, are not it. I would argue that recent speculative movies such as Melancholia, Another Earth, Cafe de Flore, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World come much closer, that even when they go wrong (Cafe de Flore must have one of the dick-est protagonists of all time) they do so in the name of trying to carve out new territory. These are films that are at least prepared to risk saying something – and not necessarily at gunpoint.

All art should risk saying something – that’s what it’s for. Looper reminds me of one of those fake presents you see in department store windows around Christmas time – all that shiny paper with nothing inside. The ‘big ideas’ which are often seen by the wider public as the specific domain of SF can be problematical artistically – all too often what we end up with is generalisation, recapitulation, a big bland surface.

Perhaps what SF needs now to revitalise it is not the far-reaching, all-encompassing new idea, but for people to draw in closer to it, to narrow their focus, to work out which aspects of the fantastic speak most powerfully to them. To write about those, and to do so with courage and with honesty. Anyone who does that has originality guaranteed.

Or, to put it in language that the Jeff Daniels character in Looper might understand (did everyone keep expecting him to say ‘deal or no deal’ or was that just me?) for Chrissakes, people, show us some IMAGINATION here, will ya??