Anyone just watch Terra Nova?

[Flaxbee]

I was hoping for a decent sci-fi show, but it looks like guns and ammo in Jurassic Park. Sigh.

Anyone else have any opinions?

[pokerfan]

1. It comes on in about twenty minutes

Probably give it a go but I don't have high hopes. Everything I've heard is that it's a real dog.

[Flaxbee]

3. It really just is Jurassic Park and automatic weapons - not very interesting

If you watched it - what did you think? I was disappointed.

[pokerfan]

5. Stargate meets Jurassic Park meets Dawson's Creek

:puke:

[NewJeffCT]

7. not a bad description of it

IMO

[Silver Swan]

2. I sort of watched it while reading a book

but I decided I wouldn't watch it again.

[Flaxbee]

4. Same here, though I was surfing the intertubes while watching..

my husband kept wandering in and out of the room, finally gave up on it, too.

[kedrys]

6. Nope - there was a hockey game on last night

:P

That said, everything I heard about it in the last week put me off sufficiently that I was not interested at all.

[kentauros]

9. Yeah, and I had repeats of House, M.D. on the DVR to watch

:P :hi:

The tagline at the end of their commercials said "Like nothing you've ever seen before." No, it's just like everything I've seen before! Hell, it even looked worse than BBC's "Primeval" and at least it had a somewhat interesting premise.

[LaurenG]

8. I watched it and I was disappointed in it

It was just too cheesy and predictable. I really wanted to like it but I just didn't.

[graywarrior]

10. I watched it while doing algebra homework

algebra was more interesting

[warrior1]

11. I couldn't take more than hour

right from the beginning I was counting the similar things from other movies. This is what I got.

Blade Runner
Solent Green
Star Gate
Jurassic Park
Avatar

If the premise of going back and time and trying to correct the mistake they made in the future, the main family is an example of "breaking the rules" by have three kids. So what is going to stop anyone else from doing that and causing the problem all over again. Oh and there is thing of an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs, thus plunging the new colonies back to where they were, not being able to breath the air.

[Abin Sur]

15. Regarding "breaking the rules", overpopulation, and other problems

In the situation they're in (in Terra Nova), the last thing they're going to worry about is overpopulation. They're going to want women to have babies, and lots of them.

In regards to the asteroid, it's going to hit the Earth at 65 million BCE. Terra Nova is set in 85 million BCE, so they have twenty million years to prepare for it. I wouldn't be too worried about it in their place. As for the problems I had with it...

The dinosaurs are way too tough/firearms are way too ineffective. A 5 ton carnivorous dinosaur is not going to shrug off multiple hits from a vehicular mounted autocannon, and a 1000 lb. dinosaur is not going to ignore multiple hits from an automatic rifle.

Giant insects such as those shown did not exist in the Cretaceous, but rather in the Carboniferous period almost 300 million years earlier. Sorry, no 6 foot long centipedes or 10 pound ticks.

The main character's son went into insta-rebellion mode the moment they wound in Terra Nova, and he and his teenage friends are too stupid to live. We can only hope that evolution will takes its course...

[LeftinOH]

12. It's 'Land of the Lost' with better FX. It was OK, though. n/t

[charlie and algernon]

13. the acting and story was ok, the visual effects of the planet (future and past) were great

I loved watching it on a digital channel on my HDTV. The first 20 minutes had some gorgeous scenery, both of the bleak future and terra nova.

The acting was meh. That family seems to be rehashing every cliche of the new comers who show up and immediately cause chaos with the native community. I predicted that there would be a second colony to create some non-dinosaur tension.

I might watch next week just because pilot episodes are usually clunky and filled with exposition. I want to see if it can find it's legs or if this is yet another failed attempt at LOST.


EDIT: Oh yeah, I did have to laugh that the dinosaurs of 1993's Jurassic Park are STILL better than any of the dinosaurs created today.

[Swede]

14. Not a bad beginning.

We shall see how it progresses.

[Abin Sur]

16. Came across this review, and can't argue with it.

http://www.stripersonline.com/t/819124/so-i-watched-the-new-dinosaur-series-terra-nova

In the two hour pilot the settlers are menaced by several Allosaurs and a pack of vicious Raptor-like creatures called "Slashers". A few people are killed and eaten. The settlers respond by unloading zillions of bullets at the monsters from a variety of guns, yet never actually manage to kill one. In fact, the only effective weapon they have turns out to be non-lethal thingies that shoot pulses of green something-or-other which appears to hurt so much that the Dinos retreat.

Now just pretend for a moment you're a settler. You've come to build a life in a new land. This land is full of monsters and you discover none of the guns they have actually - you know - work. Worse still, the land available to you to settle is one big walled compound only. You can't got out to even take a leak without risking becoming something's lunch. So no homestead or farm for you. Might you not be a bit disgruntled? Don't you think somebody might stand up at a meeting and say something about that? Something like:

"Yeah, hi everybody I'm The Hairy Beast, from the newest wave of settlers. Nice to meet you all. I been looking around all last week and I have a couple of questions. First, why don't we get some guns that work? Remember last week when the two Allosaurs ate my son Phil outside the gate? We unloaded a ton of bullets at it and nothing happened. Well, except that my son Phil got eaten. I'm thinking that if we had guns that could actually kill an Allosaur, maybe Phil would still be around. Why don;t we work on that? And second, why are there Allosaurs in this area in the first place? They're apex predators, after all, there can't be that many around. If we got some guns that work we could go out and prune em back so it'd be safe to leave the compound, right? And those armored jeeps we got don't seem very safe, why not ask the home base to send us a few helicopters? Allosaurs are too big to hide from Helos, and they can't eat em either, so we could fly em around and pop off all the Allosaurs in the area pretty easy. Aren't we supposed to be settlers? Don't settlers settle? Packing ourselves into a walled compound while we allow dinosaurs to roam around free doesn't seem like a growth enterprise to me."

They started this story with a line uttered by the Terra Nova boss: "We're not going to repeat the mistakes of our old world in this one." Apparently defending yourself and your family from things that want to kill you is a mistake - at least in Hollywood.