I watched the whole thing last night, from start to finish, in what I term a "good faith effort" to support science fiction on major networks. I have mixed emotions about the whole thing, spoilers below:











Likes:
- They cleaned up all the obvious science issues early on, via some ham-fisted exposition. See, the future really sucks because you can't breathe and have babies and stuff, and there's this "time fracture" that only goes to one different time, allows for travel only one way, and apparently dumps you in an alternate time stream so that pesky principles like the butterfly effect don't eliminate life as we know it in the present day. Not the most inventive or dynamic plot device, but I guess it serves its purpose.

- And once you get there, you get to "start over" in this cleverly designed, well-fortified settlement that is filled with young pioneer-like people who do cool jobs and eat fancy fruit.

- BUT not everything is kosher here in Terra Nova. Since young kids with nothing to do during the day can sneak out through the pole-fence (guess chain-link or barbed wire doesn't time travel well?) they find these weird markings out in the wild that shouldn't be there while they're cliff diving and making moonshine. I liked seeing this young group experiencing life on the frontier, and the son's interaction with them seemed a bit forced but not over the top, given the circumstances.

- Also, there's this rival settlement of people who came through on the 6th pilgrimage. At first you think they're bad, but they may not be.

Dislikes:

- Spielberg, of all people, should know how to make dinosaurs look realistic. These things looked like something from the latest SyFy channel monster of the week film. Did they just have someone color them in with crayon?!?!

- Story-wise, the protagonist Dad is written terribly, I thought. Though the actor does his best with material, there were far too many cliches in his character to make him compelling.

- Also, I thought the son had a perfectly valid reason to be pissed off at his Dad. In the opening scenes, they made it seem like the little girl (couldn't they have just sedated her or something?) would be taken away or killed or something. Turns out the jerk could have just gotten away with a fine AND kept his kid if he hadn't lost his temper? Granted, we're assuming that statement to be true, but the Dad sure didn't try to correct his son's statement. I would think that the reply of "No, son, they would have killed her. So don't be such a jerk." would have set things straight.

- The total lack of security in Terra Nova. They have giant bugs, man-eating dinosaurs and rival colonists who want to steal their stuff, but our pole-fence is totally sufficient. And we don't notice our SUVs are missing for 4-6 hours.

- And by the way, someone went through the trouble of laying out some dirt roads in the un-tamable jungle - that's how all of their SUVs get around. And by the way, we're starting over, so we brought our SUVs. It's ok, they run on "power cells."

- I guess these dinosaurs are totally impervious to, like, everything? The big ones chasing the SUVs get shot by mounted heavy artillery and whatever super-weapons are mounted on Terra Nova's walls, but just shrug it off. The slasher dinosaurs get shot IN THE FACE by automatic weapons fire more times than I can count, but nothing brings them down. Even in the end when they break out their green-light-superweapons the slashers just run around and try to kill people anyways. This will get annoying.

I will say I stayed intrigued for *most* part. There are plenty of issues with pacing, cardboard characters, and annoying plot devices, but it's watchable. The Sixer plotline has potential, as does the mystery surrounding Taylor's son.

Thoughts?