Terra Nova Review

3rd October 2011

*** Warning, large spoilers ahead ***

So here it finally is at last. After being delayed for several months Terra Nova, the Steven Spielberg helmed science fiction show, is finally on the screen. The question every one is asking is, was it worth the wait?

Terra Nova takes places in the year 2149. The human race has destroyed the earth’s atmosphere through pollution and over population to the point where the air is toxic and the world has gone to shit. Luckily though, there’s a time portal that will take the human race back 65 million years to the crustaceous period and an alternate time stream of earth so the human race can save them selves.

We barely have time to contemplate this though as we’re quickly thrown face first into the story. Within the first twenty minutes, the lead character Jim Shannon (Jason O’Mara) is found guilty of having more children than the law allows and thrown into jail. He then promptly breaks out of jail and escapes through the time portal with his family to Terra Nova. We’re told that he’s a police officer – as if this would help to explain how he breaks out of a maximum security prison and then back into a maximum security compound where the portal is held – with only a blue laser cutter given to him by his wife. I can appreciate the writers are eager to get into Terra Nova and begin the real story, but it doesn’t really forgive how rushed the beginning thirty minutes is. Scenes spent in the future would have been a great time to build up anticipation for seeing crustaceous period earth however it feels as if it was only used as a springboard to jump straight into Terra Nova.

Luckily though, prehistoric earth is where the show really hits its stride and starts giving us some of the cinematic scope that has been so hotly anticipated. The lush tropical locations really give it the feel of an earth millions of years ago and the wide expansive shots really show off the special effects that have gone into creating this prehistoric earth. As well as this the story starts to pick up and the characters get a little more interesting. We start to learn why Jim’s wife Elisabeth Shannon (Shelley Conn) was chosen to go to Terra Nova and some of the surrounding politics of who gets chosen to go into the past. We also learn about the rest of the family as well with the son and the daughter both getting some screen time to flesh out their characters. It has to be mentioned that the family dynamic of this show works rather well. There are some touching scenes involving Jim’s daughter not remembering who he was that really stands out in mind. These scenes really show off the potential for the show as not just being special effects driven entertainment, but a character drama that shows how a family would be affected in such a difficult situation.

This touching scene is quickly followed by the first introduction of the dinosaurs on the show. We get to see our first look at a ‘veggie’ dinosaur and also our first real look at the creature special effects on Terra Nova. The special effects were good, but still not at the level I was expecting of a show that had this much money poured into it. The special effects still look rather cheap, the kind of look and feel that I would expect from a BBC documentary on dinosaurs and not a big budget television show of this caliber. I don’t know if that’s because these days we’re inundated with special effects from big budget blockbusters that ruin any look and feel that the small screen can offer, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed when I saw the CGI dinosaurs of Terra Nova.

After settling into their new home and Shannon family are sent off to do their various new jobs to help populate Terra Nova. Josh & Maddy Shannon (Landon Liboiron and Naomi Scott) head off to an induction before Josh Shannon takes it upon him self to go and explore alone. It’s here that he meets Skye (Allison Miller) who convinces him to break the boundaries of the compound and go into the wilderness with her and a group of other young rule breakers. After diving into a waterfalls rock pool Skye explains about the different equations that are written in the rocks and how she doesn’t know who created them. We also find out that it’s an off limits area, probably because of this very reason.

The bad guys of the show are soon introduced as the mysterious ‘sixers’. After a failed attempt to kill the military lead of the island (Commander Nathaniel Taylor played by Stephen Lang of Avatar fame) one of their members is captured and the sixers are forced to try and rescue him. It’s hard not to draw parallels between ‘The Others’ from Lost when thinking about the ‘sixers’. They’re both a mysterious group of people that no body seems to know any thing about and only seem to want to cause trouble for other people in the area. I hope that unlike ‘The Others’ the writers of this show will see fit to really flesh these guys out and give them a really good reason for why they’re there and what they’re doing. If it turns out they’re just fucking with the other colony because some Egyptian God or evil black smoke of righteous death is telling them to, I for one will not be impressed.

The sixers get their man and are quickly off back to their own colony when they’re attacked by some of the more nasty dinosaurs on the show. Cue the young rule breakers getting caught up in the mayhem so Commander Nathaniel and Jim Shannon head off to rescue them. People get eaten, the sixers get their man back and most people get back to Terra Nova safe and sound. We then find out that it is in fact Commander Nathaniel’s son who has been missing for several years that has been writing the mysterious equations on the walls of the waterfall and this is all to stick it to his father about the real purpose of Terra Nova.

There are a lot of things that I haven’t really covered in this review. This first episode of Terra Nova was long and extensive and it would be impossible to write about every thing that happened in the episode. That said though, I don’t think it was a particularly bad start to a series. It definitely had its down falls but all in all I think the strong elements of the show stood out a lot more than the elements that drag it down. I think this series has a lot of potential, though whether it lives up to this potential is another story. If the show focuses of the characters and the mystery surrounding the sixers I think it will do very well. If how ever the writers choose to focus on special effects rather than story and characters, I think the show will lose appeal to a lot of people very quickly. Only time will tell and unlike our lucky characters in Terra Nova, if we watch this series and it turns out to be shit, we can’t go back in time and stop our selves from ever wasting our time watching it.

Facebook

Google

Twitter

We hope you're enjoying BRWC. You should check us out on our social channels, subscribe to our newsletter, and tell your friends. BRWC is short for battleroyalewithcheese.