Fox premiered one of its new shows last night called Terra Nova. The show begins in the year 2149 where the planet’s resources are just about gone, the air is so polluted that everyone has to wear a mask, and the earth is so over populated that there’s a restriction on the number of children you can have. So, what do you do with all those extra freakin’ people? You send them to the past! Some geniuses create a time machine and start sending people 85 million years into the past to set up a colony and live there. Well, that’s one way to get rid of some folks…let the dinosaurs eat them!
Terra Nova follows the Shannon family consisting of the father Jim (Jason O’Mara), the mother Elizabeth (Shelley Conn), and the children Josh (Landon Liboiron), Maddy (Naomi Scott), and Zoe (Alana Mansour) as they leave their bleak world and try to adjust to living in the past with the dinosaurs. The show said the only hope is 85 million years in the past!?!!! Really!?! If you say so.
The two hour premiere was utterly non-monumental. The characters so far have been the same kind of dull stock characters that we’ve seen over and over- bratty teen son, strong-jawed boring dad, hardass old military dude, etc. The first hour was especially boring since it was setting up the story. Then they spend a lot of time marveling at the sun and the fresh air. Whoopee. The second hour did pick up though with some action and excitement between the run-ins with dinosaurs and a rogue group of bad guys called the “Sixers.”
The scenery makes for a pretty picture, but it didn’t really move me when watching it. You can tell just about everything is CGI and I’m not a fan of it. Everything just looks really, really fake. I can’t engage in the show when I’m constantly being reminded that they’re on a set pretending to stare at the moon, rather than looking at a real one. The background CG is pretty, but I’m a fan of going as natural as one can.
It was interesting enough in the second hour for me to keep watching to see how it progresses. And when you watch it, keep in mind that most television shows get better with time. Don’t get too attached though, seeing as how it’s a sci-fi show on Fox. That means that it will most likely get about 23 episodes max, and then right when we all start to love it, right when it starts to get good, Fox will cancel it. Maybe this time it’ll be different with someone like Steven Spielberg as an executive producer. We shall see!
This is the Action Flick Chick, and you’ve just been kicked in the ass!
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when the slashers where attacking the jeep, you can so tell they was using plastic dinos, if they can use realistic dinosaur puppets in a stage show they can use them on TV.
I have a fairly high tolerance for bad tv/movies (I even liked The Cape) and it was probably the worst 1.5 hrs of tv that I have ever seen. The story is an obvious combination of Earth 2, Jurrasic Park and Outcasts – some of the science is just plain wrong (hyperoxia is caused by a lack of oxygen, not an excess of it) – weak, expositional dialogue that, when it’s not telegraphing the entire plot, is opening up a new and more glaring plot hole every 5 minutes – laughably stilted and ham-fisted acting (you could drive a truck through the delayed reactions … I’m convinced that they were reading off teleprompters) and it was shot to look almost exactly like the first episode of Outcasts. It was so bad that it made the first season of Babylon 5 look like Firefly. The only positive thing that I can say about it is that it would be great fodder for RiffTrax.
(John, I don’t wanna be “that guy,” but “Hypoxia” is the lack of Oxygen. “HyPERoxia” actually is the excess of Oxygen.)
At any rate, I didn’t watch it, I DVR’d it because I took my daughter to a baseball game instead. But after reading ALL SORTS of reviews from “meh” to “OMG SUXORZ,” I fear this was a semi-decent plot concept that fell on across the tracks of the Eastbound train to Not-Gonna-Make-Itsville, only to die a gruesome and ugly dismembering death.
I have a teeny tiny problem with the ENTIRE concept of the show. I mean, I understand the concept of Going back in time to try to correct the bad things from happening, and apparently they find a loophole in the whole “go back in time + change something = wipe out yourself before you were born” paradox. But what I don’t really get – and its kind of a big “huh?” – Don’t the Dinosaurs get wiped out – along with EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE PLANET – by a huge meteor / extinction level event? Then why go back that far? Won’t the whole civilization they create get similarly wiped out?
Meh, its on Fox, so I’m sure it will get cancelled LONG before anybody realizes that faux pas anyway.
>Don’t the Dinosaurs get wiped out – along with
>EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE PLANET
HAH! I hadn’t even thought of that, but an excellent point. Still, I could’ve looked the other way if they’d given us one, just one character who was at all engaging. Or in lieu of that, a show without the ubiquitous Angry/Rebellious Teenager. As soon as I saw that, I wandered out of the room and never looked back (especially when he went from “Where’s Dad? Is Dad gonna make it?” to “Dad abandoned us! I hate him!” in about five minutes time…