It's the 22nd Century and you've just scored an orange for your illegal family. The environmentalists have lost the war and the world is choking on its own foul emissions so everyone has to wear re-breathers and live in sealed steel caves and the population police are a'knocking on the crib because you've got 2.5 kids, not the legal two and they want to know why.
What's a parental unit to do?
Go to TerraNova, a world 85 million years removed from 2149 in the Cretaceous Period when dinos of all stripes and hungers roamed. This form of time travel is safe, or course, because the scientists have discovered that this is an alternate timeline that doesn't affect the future? No, "like, uh, stepping on butterflies and stuff" and making a mess of the future, according to science geek and cute teen daughter Maddy Shannon (Naomi Scott) who is our apparent guide to this brave, new world of science oddities. Or...is there a dark secret the Terra Novians are hiding? Stay tuned.
The story spends about twenty minutes in the foul world of the present, uh past, future?...never mind - the main story's protagonists, the Shannon fam, spend only a brief time in their current reality until making the jump to the distant past where mankind, womankind and kid-kind have set
up a para-military compound to keep out the dinos that want to eat them but also where friendly brontosaurs (or something like them) eat vegetation from your hand like you were on the other side of the giraffe exhibit at Wild Animal Park.
The Shannons have a son, teen daughter (the afore-mentioned geek) and a young daughter who doesn't always remember daddy because he was in prison before they left. Even though Jim Shannon (Jason O'Mara) was a cop in 2149, those population police have bad tempers and no sense of humor when it comes to hiding little girls in obvious places like ventilation shafts and they put him in a prison where his wife can smuggle in a cutting laser powerful enough for him to slice through bars.
See, Mrs. Shannon (Shelley Conn) is a trauma surgeon who is in high-demand in TN and so most
of the family is being sent there in one of the later migrations. All Jim Shannon has to do to join them is simply break out of his maximum security prison and break into another one, with his five-year-old daughter in a back pack, (I "kid" you not - how messed up is this child gonna be - everyone is always shoving the poor thing into tight, dark places and telling her to be quiet.)
Spoiler alert - he does all this horrendously difficult, stealthy stuff and then just hits a few guards in the chops at the portal and run/leaps into the glowing gate that will take him to TerraNova. Simple enough and really, why spend time on logic when all we really want to see is the dinos. Let's get to it!
So then, once in Terra Nova stuff happens, people meet "cute," and dinos attack - all standard back-to the-Cretaceous fare. Teen girls and guys are all hot , soldiers are bad-ass, and ginormous insects crawl over your arm but never sting or bite anyone for some reason.
And teens being teens, they like, sneak out of the compound (easily) and go "skinny-sipping" at the local majestic waterfall-pond while chugging homebrew made from fruts (fruits/nuts, get it?) Of course those rascally teens do get caught between a rock and a sharp place by the razor tails of these bad-tempered carnivores but that's just the way they roll in Jurrasic Nova. All somewhat standard and predictable
fare
elevated slightly with good production values and some well-written moments.
There are several subplots to keep it (maybe) interesting including a rogue scientist son who leaves hieroglyphics on rocks near the neighborhood waterfall and a group called "The Sixers" (or is it "Sixes?" Probably - the basketball team would be fun but a bit jarring, I guess) who are also rogues who left the main compound en masse for reasons unknown as part of the Sixth Migration - hence the clever name.
Stephen Lang plays Commander Nathaniel Taylor, a more warm and fuzzy version of the crazed commander he postured in "Avatar." He's still a bad, buffed-out dude but he's a benign dictator this time and the first man to actually set foot on TN who then established the settlement back in the day.
Big time A-lister Steven Spielberg is exec producer (one of eleven, srsly!!) and the show both benefits and suffers from Mr. Spielberg's trademarked sense of drama. Everyone who talks is either cute, self-important or ponderous. Speeches are punctuated by close-ups so we know the character is saying something crucial to the plot or scene.
For example, in the middle of a rescue mission
where nasty, speedy carnivors are attacking and a troop of soldiers is shooting and rushing around, Jim and his wife have a heart-to-heart about parenting. Huh?
The last scene in the pilot has the adorable, little Shannon daughter asking her plucky parents if "it's going to fall on us." She's talking about the moon of course, which she's never seen because she's young and it was normally covered by pollution. And I guess the school she attended didn't have DVD players or books or anything so she couldn't possibly know about it.
The shots are of the family gathered outside, staring up in an horribly orchestrated moment that's meant to invoke an emotional response - the master manipulator at work. You know it's Spielberg when the camera attacks and eats the actors' faces.
I’m on the fence with TerraNova. It’s a big-time production with solid actors and lots of fun action stuff. I just wish it wasn’t so...Jurassic Spielbergy-Parky.
Then again, it's hard to bet against the genius of the man who redefined so much of our entertainment.
TerraNova is on Monday nights on Fox.
