Before I even watched Terra Nova I thought of the title I would use for this post: Terrable. Not that I’m a pessimist. No, if I liked it I would have used Terrabrill, which is the better title. I wanted to like Terra Nova purely because of this, I’ll be proud of that title all week, like that time I came up with the best pun ever (you had to be there/I’m still smug about it) a few weeks ago.
You can see by the actual title that this is anything but Terrabrill. At first Terra Nova seems a bit confusing, there is so much clunky exposition during the first hour of the pilot that it’s pretty hard to follow. That is until you realise you’ve already seen it. At its simplest, it’s Stargate meets Jurassic Park, but it’s so much more than that. There’s echoes of Avatar what with the jungle and weird creatures, and they even have the crazy colonel from Avatar playing a crazy colonel. There’s a forbidden zone just like in Planet of the Apes, there are some strange hieroglyphics on some rocks just like in Smallville, there are “others” just like in Lost, there’s even a weird midget guy just like in Twin Peaks. Well not the midget…yet. There is hardly anything original about Terra Nova, you’ve seen everything already so what’s the point of it?
A spork is just two pre-existing things mashed together and that works fine so why can’t you mash several films and TV shows together? Well you can, and they have, but much like the spork it’s not a revelation. A spork doesn’t function better than a spoon or fork, and Terra Nova isn’t better than Stargate or Jurassic Park, it’s not even better than Avatar.
*This may be a good time to explain the premise of Terra Nova. It’s the future (2149), Earth is overly populated but luckily a rift in time and space enable the people to start a colony in the Cretaceous age where there are dinosaurs and shit.*
Its formula may be readymade for success - the money thrown at it means it probably will be a hit - but there’s something inherently shit about it. It looks nice and all but so did Avatar, and what’s a beautiful setting if it’s populated with dickheads? And boy are there some dickheads. We’re introduced to a family who have broken the law by having three children (in 2149 you are only allowed two) and their reason for having three children? We just felt like it really. We just felt like breaking the law for shits and giggles. Just so we’re even more sympathetic towards these rebels the dad punches a policeman and goes to prison. Oh the injustice. He then precedes to break out of prison and smuggle himself into Terra Nova with his family.
So they’re a flippantly lawless family but they’re not annoying, boring but not annoying. Well maybe the teenage son is annoying. Maybe he is like Tom Cruise’s son in War of the Worlds, fucking annoying. Carrying around a hatred for his dad like it’s nobody’s business. “Oh I hate you and it’s all your fault I turned out to be a total prick” and all that bollocks. It’s understandable because he left a girlfriend behind in 2149, and he wuvs her. It would be understandable if he wasn’t cavorting with some other broad a mere twenty minutes later.
I could probably live with this, so what if the characters aren’t interesting and one of them is irritating? If the concept is good then I’m in, I fell in love with Lost before I even noticed how dreamy Sawyer was. Terra Nova could have been brilliant, unoriginal, but brilliant all the same. It’s easy to think that Lost was bad because of the ending, but it was truly great at patiently giving you details and keeping you intrigued. Aversely Terra Nova sets out to explain everything as quickly as possible, and badly. To tell us what Terra Nova is, the sister of the family (didn’t catch her name) tells her annoying brother what it is, because he seems to be more clueless than us. She might as well have looked straight into the camera during her expository speech. She even told us about how it’s a parallel timeline and therefore we needn’t worry about the butterfly effect. She was very clear on that.
We’re given too much information too soon and with this there is no mystery or intrigue. The family are told they cannot leave the confines of the colony, ooo what’s out there? I’m interested, but ten minutes later we find out exactly what’s out there. The forbidden zone is no longer a mystery, it’s just Jurassic Park and shit. We learn that there are others out there, but we immediately learn who they are and how they came to be. Lost was able to keep their “others” shrouded in mystery for almost three seasons giving us little details here and there, Terra Nova managed about thirty minutes.
There might be more revelations to come but they have shown us too much too soon, Jack Bauer wouldn’t catch the terrorist in the first hour and then relax for the next twenty three. There’s not much you can do with dickheads and dinosaurs and you have to think that the show will only get more and more ludicrous as they run out of ideas. Why dinosaurs anyway? Are we that impressed with them? I wanted to like Terra Nova, I wanted it to be Terrabrill, but it’s Terrashit.
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