Movie Box Review

Here, in the end, is all you needed to know about TERRA NOVA:  in its entire 2-hour season--and very possibly series--finale, dinosaurs were sighted for a grand total of about 2 minutes.

Remember the original promos for Terra Nova, the ones that played on FOX for months while the show kept getting postponed?  The ones that promised a Jurassic Park experience in your living room, week-in and week-out, with blockbuster-movie level computer-generated dinos?  Well, after the big-budget series pilot, that show didn't exist.  What Terra Nova turned out to be instead was a story about good guys living in a colony walled off from some very disorganized bad guys (revolutionaries?  corporate dupes?) and prehistoric creatures that were more often talked about than seen.  (And when they showed up, they turned out to be the CG equivalent of cardboard cutouts.)

The Shannons, aka World's Most Uninteresting Family, were the leads, bested only by Skye, The World's Most Harmless Spy and, later in the season, by Lucas Taylor, The World's Most Insipid Villain.  Lucas was the son of Commander Taylor, who as played by Stephen Lang was the only one in all of prehistory to be a little bit interesting.  Lucas had been built up in early episodes as some kind of freaky insane genius who knew how to solve the mysteries of time travel and passage between universes, but he turned out to be the anti-Carrie Mathison, a pouting post-adolescent madman who became duller and more banal the more we saw of him, obsessed with daddy issues and what happened in Somalia.  Having him as Terra Nova's chief antagonist was like making a huge-budgeted superhero epic where the villain was Biff from Back to the Future.

There were so many awful moments in the finale that it's hard to choose just one:  daddy Commander not realizing his crazy son wanted a hug for the very first time just so he could stab dad?  The fuss about Jim Shannon vanishing through an unknown portal to the past, possibly lost in unexplored parts of the planet... only to have him turn up behind the nearest tree?  The idiot bad guy who thought he'd been injected with deadly microorganisms because someone told him so?  The big "mystery" for a purported next season of a 18th-century ship turning up in the desert (seen Close Encounters much?)?  Maybe it was the way every one of the villains believed Jim's ridiculous fake deafness and limp even as Jim was running all over the compound and having conversations with everyone in earshot.

Whether Terra Nova comes back next season will ultimately be determined by factors of no interest to mere viewers:  overseas sales, the network's slate of 8PM development, the possibility of reduced network license fees.  What the finale proved conclusively, however, is that the show deserves to be left in the distant past.

This is--maybe--what a big fat hit looks like.  Maybe, because anything can happen between a pilot and its series, or even between episodes (remember when Heroes came back for Season 2 and suddenly it was terrible?)-- especially, as here, where only the first hour of the 2-hour pilot exists, and even that hour has some temp special effects.  So TERRA NOVA is far from a sure thing.  But it sure has the makings of a show that could hit the mass TV audience right in its sweet spot.


What if Jurassic Park were a housing development?  That's essentially the basis for Terra Nova, although actually the two concepts take place in completely different earthly time frames:  Jurassic imagined the contemporary reanimation of dinosaurs, while in Terra Nova, people of a dystopian future are transported back millions of years to live in the era when dinos were native.  But both projects take place in and around similar-looking complexes built to keep the carnosaurs out, and both, not coincidentally, have Steven Spielberg as wizard in charge.

In classic Spielberg style, the drama rotates around a troubled family:  dad Jim Shannon (Jason O'Mara) was a futuristic Chicago cop whose marriage to scientist Elisabeth (Shelley Conn) was in danger of falling apart when the two of them decided to have a third child, an action forbidden by law; Jim ended up in jail.  But when Elisabeth is recruited with their 2 legal teens (Landon Liboiron and Naomi Scott) for the Terra Nova time-travel project, Jim breaks out of prison to take their youngest (Alana Mansour) with them.  Beyond the dinosaurs and other local threats, the Shannons will continue to have their interpersonal strains.

The script (lots of people worked on it, including Rene Echevarria, Allan Loeb, Brannon Braga, Craig Silverstein and Kelly Marcel--it's not clear yet just who's getting screen credit) isn't smarter than your average Hollywood blockbuster-it's not Game of Thrones, and it's not Battlestar Galactica--but it's cunningly constructed to allow for plenty of potential storylines.  Despite his criminal record, Jim quickly proves his worth to the leader of the community, Nathaniel Taylor (Stephen Lang), and joins his security service; soon Jim discovers there are other settlers from the future trying to sabotage the project.  Meanwhile, there's the Shannons' shaky marriage, their kids' budding romances, giant man-eating beasts, and where did those strange designs outside the Terra Nova walls come from?

Alex Graves, whose credits include the pilot for Fringe, serves as director, and even with temp effects, Terra Nova has the scale and energy of a feature film, with gorgeous cinematography and a huge production design.  (Just what will happen when the show has to deal with inevitably smaller episodic budgets is unclear.)  The cast is capable, with the early standout being Lang, who does a less blatantly evil version of his Avatar role (it won't be much of a surprise if his character turns out to be less than a good guy here, too).  For now, the Shannon family is basically photogenic and personable; there's so much going on in the pilot that we only get a superficial handle on them.

FOX could have paired Terra Nova with their new X-Factor for a superpowered launch, but they have so much confidence in the show that they're letting it kick off their Monday nights as the lead-in to House.  The gamble may pay off; the show has potential to be an "all quadrants" smash, appealing to families, men and women, young and old.  (Mitch Metcalf's Monday projection has it behind ABC's Dancing With the Stars and the How I Met Your Mother/2 Broke Girls combo on CBS, but the show will certainly be hyped by FOX into a major premiere event, and it could be a breakout hit.)   The dinosaur-sized question now is whether they can successfully translate their strong hour into a successful series.

Read more about TV's new shows at THE SKED PILOT REPORT.