When I first heard about Terra Nova, I became very excited. The concept is simple but offers so many different possibilities. In the year 2149 the earth is dying. People need masks to survive the polluted planet. A rift in time has been discovered that leads back 85 million years ago and so a colony has been established there so that ‘we’ can learn from our mistakes and build a better future. I’ll be honest, the thing that drew me in was the idea of dinosaurs. I wanted big tyrannosaurs and Spinosaurs. I wanted people getting eaten and big dino face-offs. What we got was slightly different.
GOOD POINTS
+Stephen Lang as Commander Taylor is superb. He’s, in my opinion, the saviour of the show. He get’s a lot of the best lines and is a true American Hero.
+There are a few mysteries in the show that keep you watching but they don’t drag on for too long ala Lost.
+The finale was a prime example of how most of the show should have been. It had action, hope and bad guys becoming dino food. It also set things up nicely should there be a second season.
+The setting of Terra Nova is beautiful and in total contrast to the 2149 scenes. Dodgy CGI aside, the makers of Terra Nova definatly succeeded in the location shots.
BAD POINTS
+The show was a bit too cutesy at times. A series like Terra Nova really doesn’t need to be wrapped in cotton wool.
+The Shannon's are central to the show but I didn’t care about them enough. It seemed as though the writers kept thrusting them on us, trying to make us care about them. A prime example is Jim Shannon's friendship with Taylor with Taylor even leaving Jim in charge of the whole colony one day.
+The family moments are perhaps in keeping with a theme that human love survives all but I found them a little cheesy and annoying.
+There was a pretty big lack of dinosaur IMO with most of the dinos we encountered being ‘made-up’. I wanted to see dinos that I knew and recognised.
+The dodgy CGI lets down the dino moments slightly.
STAR OF THE SHOW
Stephen Lang is undoubtedly the star of Terra Nova. The show could carry on without many of the other characters but I think that it’d struggle without Taylor. He carries things and as the first human through the rift he is perhaps the most knowledgeable. He survived the first 118 days alone before the 2nd person came through the rift and that makes Taylor a hugely complex character. While many of the other colonists are slightly 1 dimensional, Commander Nathanial Taylor is well rounded with a history that you actually care about knowing.
FINAL OPINION
There are many things that let Terra Nova down but there are also many things that made it worth watching. The concept could’ve been presented in many different ways and I think that the makers of Terra Nova got it spot on. It was easy to follow while also complex enough to keep me watching. I also think that the number of episodes (12) was spot on. Sometimes American series’ drag on a bit and suffer by having to tell a story over a 24 episode season. Terra Nova carries on at a good pace with the story moving on each episode. Taylor is the perfect good guy in that in the earlier episodes he could be a bad guy. It is quite fitting that his enemy turns out to be his own son. These scenes between Taylor and Lucas really get Lang (Taylor) stretching his acting muscles and allows us to see behind the All-American facade presented by Taylor. On a slight bad note, I expected better CGI from a show as trumpeted as this one and I didn’t like the cutesy family moments.
7.5/10
If you fancy a book along the same lines, you could do a lot worse (IMO) than read Saga of the Exiles (Julian May). It's got a similar start, but a very different outcome.
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