This really disappointed me. It was unacceptably bad. As a fan of VFX and CGI, I was particularly annoyed at how none of the reviews, and most of the viewer comments on most sites, praise the VFX as being movie quality, when the original Jurassic Park outstrips them by a hefty margin. They are Jumanji bad, and that’s just not good enough, even for TV.
It’s just around the corner!
Amen to all of that.
I’m really disappointed that they’re making all of the same mistakes with dinosaur anatomy as JP, as well. We’ve had good evidence of a number of things like feathery coverings on therapods, forelimb orientation being in a “clapping” position instead of the palms-down look, stiffer tails, dorsal spines on brachiosaurs, etc., for a while now. It’s not like they had any reason to hold to JP’s look for the animals. Why not make them reflect more current thinking about dinosaurs? Argh.
This covers most of my issues and when combined with the “It was SF by committee, and most of the people on the committee didn’t know shit about SF” comment hits nearly all. There were an awful lot of screwy plot holes, even for a pilot.
I’m willing to give it a chance. I don’t mind cheesy, heck sometimes cheesey’s great. Dumb I have far less tolerance for. I can understand a bit of angsty teen doing rebellious stuff with the local hottie. No problem. When the leaders of “humanities fresh start/last hope” display the same levels of forethought…
Re: who gets chosen, I’m pretty sure they said it’s both by a lottery AND recruitment.
So really important people, like the head of the operation, doctors, engineers, etc… are all basically the best in their fields, and then the rest is filled out by lottery. I mean, got to have someone around to clean things up, cook meals, etc…I mean, it would almost be insulting to get recruited because you’re the best janitor…
Three and zero.
Anyway, as for the wrong dinosaurs for the time period, maybe the rift into 2149 isn’t the only rift. Maybe all those dinos came from their respective time periods as well. Sort of like Primeval (but with better CGI on the dinos :p.)
I disagree, i think the dinosaurs should fit what people think dinosaurs look like. You start putting feathers on them and 99% of the viewers are going to think “wtf is that? that’s no freaking dinosaur!”.
I’m not sure about that. I’ve noticed that shows on dinosaurs on History, Discovery, TLC, Science etc lately has been incorporating a lot of the new evidence into their CGI workups. I think people would be more accepting of incorporating the new ideas into how they conceptualize dinosaurs than they were in the past because we see such shows today. It would have been a nice touch to get some real data into the show, but my gripe is how badly written the first show was. I really hope they straighten things out, as the show has a lot of potential that’s being wasted. Sort of like Falling Skies had a lot of potential and they blew it.
-XT
That doesn’t sound much like fighting ignorance…
Finally watched it tonight. I skimmed the first page of the thread, saw all the haters, so skipped to the end.
The Druidess was a little disappointed the dinos got so little screen time, but overall, we liked it. Plenty of action, some skin, some dinos, and a few obvious plot hooks. Mind candy, and it’s fun.
I saw an interview the other day (I thought it was on io9 but can’t find it there now) where they said that Spielberg had specifically told the writers to not have the humans killing dinosaurs. Apparently they’re going the “all life is sacred and must be preserved” route.
It also had a brief comment that they are able to communicate with the “future”, but only during the brief time when a pilgrimage is coming through the portal. So apparently the thing only opens for a few minutes every eight months or so or something.
:rolleyes: Because that crap worked so well the last time.
Found the interview. It was on aol TV of all things…. The interview is with executive producer Rene Echevarria.
Here’s the relevant quote:
That’s also where they talk about communicating with the future.
That pretty much has to be bullshit, though. Taylor has a big dossier on Shannon, and he wasn’t supposed to have come through. The guards there had no idea who he was, so how did that information get there unless Taylor asked for it and got it?
Part of the package on his Doctor-wife?
I saw about half of it before I volunteered to go th the store.
The probe cannot communicate to the right timeline but the camp can?
Let’s hide a 3 year old in a vent and hope she stays quiet.
Dad, you wiped my ass for 14 years but you went away to prison for 2 years TO PROTECT MY 3 YEAR OLD SISTER so now I hate you.
Did I miss anything else?
[QUOTE=Saint Cad]
Did I miss anything else?
[/QUOTE]
You missed the ‘lets drop the shocked civilians in the middle of the jungle and then have them walk into camp, guarding them with a few armed soldiers, even though the guns obviously don’t work on the dinosaurs’ part. Oh, and the ‘we’re a bunch of teen agers with no brains, so lets go outside the fence (where the dinosaurs are) so that we can check out our home made still, drink some and frolic about in bathing suits…hope those dinos don’t show up!’ A few other things, but I think you hit the highlights…
-XT
I can live with the Stargate-like nature of the wormhole thingy: no communication unless the “gate” is on, which requires considerable power or other form of effort. Fine. And I enjoyed the space shot of a ridiculously desertified earth in the very beginning.
But oh boy does the show ask for a harsh review! Within mere seconds Terra Nova proceeds to rip off Bladerunner’s aerial urban shot in a manner as shameless as Battlefield Earth’s appalling “crash through windows in slow motion for the heck of it” scene.
The show may be marketed as “Jurassic Park meets Bladerunner”, but this level of imitation is pathetic.
I wondered if this “borrowing” might have been an homage, so I watched it again. It still felt like a blatant rip-off that counts on the majority of people not having seen Bladerunner. The giant digital billboards blasting echoing female voices extolling viewers to move to an off-world colony were another shameless rip.
Special effects were quite poor, and for something bearing Spielberg’s name this is unacceptable, since special effects are one thing you can count on Spielberg getting right. The quality of the dinosaurs doesn’t come close to the aging Jurassic Park. The shots of the 22nd century metropolis street-level environments were budget 1990s level CGI. The giant centipede looked like a plastic toy (check out the legs) and as someone mentioned it probably belonged to a different period. And the cop really should have broken his back after the fall that ensued, but then again a kid later got mauled by a dinosaur with jaws the size of a croc and he was just mildly scratched. I guess 22nd century people are really tough - except for black guys and those who favour the colour red.
As far as I can tell the research for this show consisted of one of the writers picking up his son’s kindergarten book on dinosaurs at breakfast before heading off to work on the script with a committee of even less educated colleagues. Plenty of examples exist already in the thread, but I was wondering about oxygen toxicity in Earth 2 - I mean Terra Nova: shouldn’t the colonists be suffering from symptoms like seizures, vision problems, and alveolar collapse?
I could live with the show’s hundreds of gaffes (and more) if they had rolled it all up into a fun and entertaining package. But no. They just had to delve deeply into useless time-filling bullshit like teenage angst, teenage rebellion, teenage love and the unbearably unappealing vicissitudes of the modern nuclear family. With all the subtlety and light touch of a sledgehammer. There must be a rulebook somewhere in TV world that specifies the mandatory inclusion of inane, inchoate and irrelevant dramatic sub-plots into any science fiction effort, lest the audience become too interested when viewing the show.
Given exciting subject matter like dinosaurs, zombies, Cylons, or aliens (take your pick) it should be impossible to crank out generic and irrelevant soap operas, yet every science fiction TV show that comes out spews forth the same tired line of cagal: a little bit of poorly thought speculative fiction with a lot of personal boring crap about uninteresting characters that I want to see die in the most brutal manner possible.
No. The oxygen levels would not be high enough to cause oxygen toxicity.
I guess that’s possible. Still, the idea that they can ask the future for things blows the alternate timeline theory out of the water.