September 27, 2011
Is There a Future For Terra Nova?
After a long wait, the dinosaur-haunted, sci-fi family drama Terra Nova premiered last night on FOX. The first episode did not leave me with a particularly strong impression. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it, either.
The hype for Terra Nova been over the top—we’ve been told time and again just how much went into creating the show’s special effects—but the first two-hour episode was so heavy on exposition that it is difficult to judge how the show will fare. (Rather than fill in the background gradually through events in the story, various characters delivered short speeches in which they provided all the essential details required by viewers.) Everything about episode one was about setting up the show’s premise, from family tensions to cryptic mumblings that will undoubtedly turn into major plot points in future episodes.
Terra Nova is far from original. The show borrows heavily from other science fiction sources. Bits and pieces—including actor Stephen Lang, who portrays Commander Nathaniel Taylor in the show—were lifted from Avatar, there’s a line about dinosaurs mostly hunting at night that is right out of ALIENS, and a few clues at the end of the first episode sound awfully close to the theme of Poul Anderson’s short story “Wildcat,” in which an oil company maintains a base to collect resources from the Jurassic and send them to the energy-starved future. Perhaps future episodes will take the show in unexpected directions, but as far as the first episode goes, Terra Nova is a mish-mash of various sci-fi tropes and references to other stories.
But what about the dinosaurs? As happy as I am to see some of my favorite prehistoric creatures running around on television, the dinosaurs had relatively little screen time and generally served to intensify already complicated situations. When your base camp is already under attack by a rival group, a rampaging Carnotaurus is the last thing you need. A sluggish herd of noodle-necked Brachiosaurus also makes an appearance, though the show’s real villains are imaginary theropods called “Slashers” (more on them in a moment).
In the few moments they did appear on screen, though, I wasn’t exactly blown away by the computer-generated dinosaurs. As in some recent documentaries, the dinosaurs of Terra Nova did not seem to blend well with their backgrounds. They often looked as if they were on another plane of existence. For all the hubbub about how the show’s creators spared no expense on the special effects, the dinosaurs did not look that much better than their counterparts in basic cable documentaries, and they even paled in comparison to the dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s other big dinosaur project, 1993′s Jurassic Park. Creating realistic, high-definition dinosaurs is still a tough challenge for animators.
So, about the slashers… I have said some unkind things about this speculative dinosaur before, and after seeing it in action, I stand by my comments. The dinosaur looks like the product of a board meeting in which everyone agreed to throw a few more bells and whistles on the “raptors” of Jurassic Park. (Upon seeing these dinosaurs, my wife said: “It’s like those poor alligators and lizards from those old dinosaur movies, the ones they’d stick all the fins and horns on to make them look more menacing.”) As I have pointed out before, paleontologists have discovered the remains of actual theropods that were far more fantastic and, I think, scary than the Slasher. As might be expected, these dinosaurs act more like plot devices than actual animals. At the climax of episode one, a mob of unorganized slashers—they are said to hunt in packs—surrounds an armored vehicle and spends much of the night trying to get at the tasty teens inside. I guess they were either bored, or easier prey is just so difficult to find that the dinosaurs decided to keep trying their luck with the metallic snackbox.
Terra Nova has potential. Now that everything has been set up and introduced—the relationships, rivalries, dangers and all that—the show’s creators can, I hope, strike a bit of new ground. Then again, maybe the program will continues to borrow tidbits of plot and setting from stories we’ve already seen. Only time will tell.
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Well, I was just impressed they got the moon right.
Haven’t finished the marathon 2-hour session yet, but I haven’t been impressed with what I’ve seen. The greenscreening is laughably bad, the carnotaurs were nice but how hard is it to look up their forelimb anatomy on Wikipedia? The brachiosaurs looked downright stupid (and it was a stolen Jurassic Park moment that they were the first dinosaurs you see).
I was also embarassed when the older daughter called them “brachiosauri” and started blabbing about how they weren’t strictly herbivorous and they had differentiated incizors and…it was just BAD. This show is going to give people the wrong ideas about these animals.
My biggest problem has been the Slasher (also, WTF is a “Howler?”). It was clearly designed by a committee and looks positively stupid. Like you say, there are so many legit scary theropods that I see no reason the Slasher should even exist.
I’m also disturbed by the “everything and everybody in one time, in one place” syndrome. Carnotaurus lives with Brachiosaurus. In Patagonia? Or Africa? Or North America? Basic research, people. If you want a menagerie of dinosaurs all in one spot, go to Hell Creek or the Morrison. This isn’t difficult.
I’ll probably have to stop watching the show due to disappointment with the gleefully inaccurate representations of dinosaurs and their world.
What? No one noticed the glaring paleontological anachronisms?
Those “slashers” were Dilophosaurs (from the early to mid Jurassic), with a sawtoothed tail appendage added. Remember, the setting is supposed to be 85 million years ago, smack in the middle of the Cretaceous. And Brachiousaurs? Weren’t they Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous? Sorry for being a geek, but if they’re supposed to be in the “real” past, would it have been asking too much for a bit more realism? To answer my own question: yes, it’s too much to ask
they aren’t in the direct past. it’s something of a different time stream
A positive review of the dinosaurs:
I thought they were much better written, less clichéd, and had better dialogue than the humans.
i enjoyed it well enough. Unlike some other folk, i can actually suspend my disbelief and enjoy a show for not conforming 100% to reality. That said, though, yeah some of the green screen work was bloody awful. I think the best the dinosaur’s looked was when the carnotaurus snatches the sixxer out of the vehicle. I usually give series like this some slack for effects because they don’t have the tools or budget of hollywood blockbusters, but given the hype this show doesn’t really have much of an excuse.
The slashers were over the top. With the tail blade, they almost look like some one tried to create a dinosaur version of the Xenomorph. I mean, all the slasher needs now is acid blood and a second pair of jaws.
I’ll stay tuned to see where the show goes. If it does hold up, maybe they can get try and get Joss Whedon on board when he finishes the Avengers. Guy certainly knows how to do stuff like this.
The show was mediocre. The time between commercial breaks in the last hour was unbearable. If the carnotaurs had any sense they would have climbed up the tails and backs of the brachiosaurs as they were leaning over the fence and run down their necks into the Terra Nova compound. So much for security.
Terra Nova is a decent premise for a dinosaur show buried under a bad family drama. I just didn’t care for the Shannons, who seemed to exhibit every cliche of TV families. (And, boy, was I rooting for the pointlessly rebellious teenage son to get eaten by the slashers.)
As for the dinosaur cast, I enjoyed the carnotaurs despite the brief time they were on screen. It led to the best line of the episode: “We’ve got carnos!” I find it interesting how carnotaurs have become a poor-man’s T.rex in dinosaur films. They were the main villains in Dinosaur, if I remember correctly.
And good call on “Wildcat.” That story definitely offers an explanation about what’s may be going on.
I’ll watch the rest of the season. The sad news is the ratings for the pilot were pretty miserable, not helped by the fact Terra Nova is up against Monday Night Football in many markets. Fox has a history of sticking its sci-fi shows in bad time slots. (Ask Firefly fans.)
I actually enjoyed the show more than I was expecting, specially the Slashers.
Stephen Lang also gives another soul to the show.
Two nights ago, when I watched the first episode of Terra Nova, I thought it was awesome, but I have to agree, most of it I thought was just plain ridiculous.
First thing I’d like to comment on is the geography of Terra Nova. Steven Spielberg did a bad job with the geography of which Terra Nova took place, let me explain, Terra Nova was in the middle of a jungle,thats it. The entire place was all one big jungle. It kind of looked like it had the same geography from the movie Avatar, except there were no floating mountains.
The second thing I’d like to comment on is the type of fruit the people at Terra Nova ate. Did you ever notice those weird fruits those people were eating? They looked like they didn’t even exist. In fact did they ever exist? Because I don’t think so.
The third thing I’d like to comment on is the animals of Terra Nova. I thought the Carnotaurus and the Brachiosaurus looked great, except Brachiosaurus didn’t live during the Late Cretaceous period, most of the sauropods have been extinct by then. How about that giant centipede? Who the heck has ever heard of such a thing? In fact, who the heck has ever heard of a giant leach? Remember that enormous leach on that guy’s back? How did that even get attached to him in the first place? I think they should have made that a deleted scene. I think the most dumbest animal that they had in Terra Nova was that freaking Slasher dinosaur. Why the heck would anyone want to create an imaginary dinosaur? I think its just,well, stupid!
You might say I have a few problems with this show, and I have to admit,I do, but you know what? These people did go through a lot of effort into making this show, and they did the best they could, but it turns out,a lot of people like you and me think that these people made a few mistakes while making this awesome,yet very strange show.
I think you need to re-watch Jurassic Park. The CGI does not hold up as well as you think in the day light scenes. Every time the dinosaurs showed up, the entire lighting in the day light scenes shifts to an awkward color that looks dimmer and grainier to hide how bad they look.
You’re probably thinking of the robots and night scenes. Night scenes can hide CGI really well so JP can sort of hold up there.
The dinosaur effects in Terra Nova is definitely beyond anything the original JP did. The biggest problem is when the Carnotarus got close to the screen and looked blurry due to motion blur and probably low resolution rendering.
To Zach, it is very probable that Sauropods were indeed omnivorous. Don’t think of them as the mammalian “cows” of the mesozoic, but rather, as huge plant-eating archosaurs (what they really are),and then look at the most similar big plant-eating archosaur living today — Ostriches! Ostriches primarily eat vegetable matter, but they are omnivores that will snap up insects and small vertebrates alike. Sceintists would not know this though until they could abserve the living animals, as would happen if Terra Nova were a real place.
All in inll, it was far from perfect, but still an entertaining TV series….. certainly better than most of what is offered these days..
I somehow doubt any true dinosaur fan would disdain from watching it simply because they think the producers got a few things wrong, and as pointed out here, some of those things may not be wrong at all!
I watched this show with some interest. Could they make a reasonable rendition of the Cretaceous and people it with, well, people? With all the hype about special effects and scientific accuracy, how well would they really hold up to scrutiny?
SInce Brian Switek pretty well covered the special effects and an annoying, fantasy theropod, I’m going to point out a couple of points that didn’t quite work. Actually, I have to say something about the slashers: they seemed like one-dimensional plot-devices that happened to take a dinosaur form. They could have been zombies, for all it mattered. In fact, they acted a lot like zombies, they just moved faster.
Minor science points:
1) One of the characters said the moon drew away from earth at about 0.5cm per year. They made a big deal about how much bigger it would appear in the Cretaceous compared to the present Actually the rate is a little over 2cm per year, and at that rate, 85 million years ago, the moon would have been more than 1,800km closer to Earth. Yes, it would appear larger. However, since the lunar distance varies by more than 49,000km today from perigee to apogee, the difference wouldn’t have been all that noticeable. However:
2) Earth’s rotation would have been significantly faster than today: the day would have been approximately 25 minutes shorter. It’s a minor point, but it would have been far more noticeable than an average lunar distance that was less than .5% closer showing a disc only about 1% larger. Yes. I’m nitpicking. Why? Because of the hype.
However, my third point is important enough to affect how they live:
3) Earth was a much warmer, wetter place 85 million years ago, with vast, shallow inland seas that covered large areas of of continents. There were no polar ice caps, average temperature was around 10 C warmer than today, and CO2 was more than five times higher. This is why life thrived and plants grew so fast. Yet, there was no mention of how warm the air was, and people seemed to live and dress as though they were in a modern, temperate climate, or much more like polar or alpine climates would have been at that time. Considering today’s political climate, I can’t help but wonder if the subject will ever be brought up.
Still, as entertainment, it has potential, provided the writers don’t get lost in the Land of Cumbersome Cliches.
When I watched the first episode of Terra Nova, I thought it was really awesome, but most of it I thought was pretty ridiculous.
The first thing I’d like to comment on is the geography in which Terra Nova took place. Did you ever notice what the geography looked like in Terra Nova? It was all jungle, that’s it. Did you ever notice the type of plants that grew at Terra Nova? They didn’t look prehistoric, they look more like modern day plants. I guess that IS what they’re supposed to look like.
The second thing I’d like to comment on is the food at Terra Nova. Did you ever notice those strange fruits the people at Terra Nova were eating? They looked like they never even existed. In fact did they ever exist? Because I don’t think so.
The third thing I’d like to comment on is the animals in Terra Nova. The only two animals I thought were pretty cool was the Carnotaurus and the Brachiosaurus. But there was only one thing wrong with that, Brachiosaurus didn’t live during the Late Cretaceous period. It lived during the Late Jurassic period. Now how about that giant centipede? I thought that was a little weird. And remember the scene with that enormous leach on that guy’s back? I think that should have been a deleted scene. I think my least favorite animal would have to be the Slasher. I only hate this dinosaur because its made up. The Slasher kind of looks like a Guanlong in a raptor’s body. Also, I think what has to be most disappointing is that they didn’t show that many dinosaur scenes. And even when they did have a very dramatic dinosaur scene it mostly showed the Slasher in it, which is not a real dinosaur!!
You might say I have a few problems with this show, but aside from all the bad stuff I said above, I thought it was a really great show, and I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the next episode of Terra Nova coming on next Monday.
Do not read comment #10, that was just a rough draft. Read comment #13.
Thank you.
The “brachiosaurs” threw me for a loop, although I’d like to give the show the benefit of the doubt and assume the character got it wrong. Were there any Cretaceous titanosaurs that could have passed as brachiosaurs?
The Slashers kind of bugged me as well. They SUCK at pack hunting and their design is pretty goofy. That said, I see nothing wrong with including “undiscovered” creatures in a show like this, as long as they show a diversity of real animals as well.
Shannon, I agree about using “undiscovered” creatures. After all, the odds are that most species are either never fossilized or fossilized so infrequently that we have yet to find them. However, the slashers were irritating; they didn’t act like animals, they acted like movie monsters.
Harkening back to Jurassic Park, Spielberg said he wanted to portray dinosaurs as ‘just animals’, not as monsters. The makers of ‘Terra Nova’, including Mr. Spielberg, would do well to remember that.
Confused. Terra Nova claims the “transporting [of] select humans from the devastated future 85 million years into the past”, which to me would infer the later Cretaceous period? So aren’t the Brachiosaurus (or as she says “Brachiosaur”) and Ceratosaurus late Jurassic? Hence not around at this point? Seems like the vegetation was wrong as well?
Oops, I think I mixed up Ceratosaurus with T-rex which I guess was around during that period ..
[...] be sure to check out Brian’s text review of the episode on the Smithsonian Magazine Blog (where he even embedded the trailer, our kind of [...]
[...] week we got our first look at Terra Nova—FOX’s new dinosaur-populated, time-travel TV drama. I wasn’t exactly bowled over [...]
@Richard: I totally agree. The “Slashers” are pretty awful on the level of both design and concept.
@Michael Quick: If you’re talking about the big therapods that chase the vehicles in the first episode, those were supposed to be Carnotaurus, which were Late Cretaceous. So that makes sense, as long as you’re assuming it’s set in S. America. As far as the vegetation, it seemed kind of off to me as well, but I know zilch about paleobotany. Maybe it depends on geography?
I agree with many of the above criticisms and will add one I didn’t see. As Richard (@15) said, the dinosaurs were treated more like movie monsters than actual animals and the main way that manifest in my view was their apparently being nearly impervious to bullets!
So reading all the comments left everyone. The show as a whole for T.V. isn’t bad. Yes, it’s no Jurassic Park, but that was a movie so there was more money to play with. I agree that Terra Nova is one of the more entertaining shows out there. Dinosaur things are rare as hard to do already. Not a fan of made up dinos. There is a wide range of ones to use and the producers should do that. I get the whole time travel thing and a new time stream so it’s okay to me that certain dinos are c-exsisting. I think the general point is to be entertained, but Spielburg is worried about copying Jurassic Park…ummm did anyone notice that the fences and main buliding had so obviouse look a like to Jurassic Park. I don’t care if they take things from Jurassic Park, those movies worked, so play in the feild you have and just take it to a whole new level it really isn’t that hard. Take what works and improve it. I will watch the show for as long as it can go. Unless Fox does something stupid like axe it. Which they do. Sorry Firefly was bomb and it ticked me off it was canned. Sci-Fi stuff, good Sci-Fi stuff is rare. Just when watching try to keep a more open mind to it and I think the pay off will be good. Just please stop with the Slasher. No more made up B.S. garbage dinos. Don’t insulte the fans and Dino nerds.
I really enjoyed the episodes. The only issue I have is that the father seemed to pass a back pack containing another human being to his wife like it weighed nothing and then the mom also acted like it weighed nothing. Aside from that, this is a great show! I don’t see why anyone is looking to make it realistic at all. First of all, time travel… Secondly, it is just fun! If you are a firefly fan, then you can’t use the fact that this show isn’t 100% accurate with regards to what we know (lets forget about what we don’t know) of that time period. I give it a 100! I really enjoyed it.
What a croc. (No pun intended) Any paleontologist would tell you that if you had a real choice, no one with two brain-cells to rub together would voluntarily choose to colonize the Jurassic. Far and away, the best option is not to time-travel 65-100 mya, but rather go back in time to 59 million years ago. All the biggest, juiciest dinosaurs are already extinct. The mammalian predators would be no bigger than a housecat; really the most dangerous thing on land would be alligators; but we have them now. It would be a verdant, fertile world with virtually no competition. But rather boring in terms of special effects.
Have really enjoyed the show. The characters grew on me.
the finale, well, lets say, I hope there will be another season!
Absolutely loved the show. The premise is great. The ability for the human race to have a second chance on how to better use and protect our beautiful world from global warming. The family unit which the show is centered around has infinite story possibilities.
I was extremely disappointed the show was cancelled by Fox and not immediately picked up by another network. The show was wonderful and I was looking forward to a run of many successful seasons. I have many friends and they all felt the same way.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: THis show has infinite possibilities and once running for several seasons I am sure will develop a loyal following and grow by the season. Please find a way to keep the show in action.
From many many adoring fans.