User reviews

I am only here because I gave La Brea a try. I made it through 8 episodes and I started to think of Terra Nova while watching it. Terra Nova had its problems, mostly the teenage anger that had to be worked though. Both shows have the problem of overabundance in that regard. Enough about La Brea, I mention only to demonstrate how intangibles can make or break.

I watched this show some 11 years ago so my memory is not perfect. My kids were nearly 10 and 12 at the time. We could watch this as a family and we all enjoyed it. It could have done with better writers and it is a shame they didn't get them.

Yes the kid characters were a tad annoying. Teenagers just won't be constantly angry with their dad with dinosaurs around unless that dad commits a serious transgression. My kids got surly but never anything severe and they didn't have the danger or a dinosaur eating them.

The story line worked well (keeping in mind this is science fiction) and a interesting premise. There is what I expect is a glaring plot hole. We know it is amazingly expensive in terms of resources to send people from the future to the past and we have to assume it is similar going from that same past to the current day. It just won't be cost effective to send resources forward to the present. If it were a good option I suspect they would send a lot of modern heavy machinery back to make Terra Nova easier going.

I was disappointed this did not get 5 seasons. My wife was disappointed. Worst, my kids were disappointed and this kept it between the lines and we could enjoy it as a family. I think it would still be a good option for Netflix/Amazon/Any of them to pick it up and run with it but I don't think that will happen.

Oh, and La Brea gets dumber and dumber with every episode.

Okay folks,

I get it that for most of you high and mighty reviewers Terra Nova seems to be dumb. but I honestly do not feel this way.

People complaining about some holes and everything is just ridiculous with a series that is sending people 80million years in the past. come on people, give them a chance. (if anyone is going to mention the asteroid again I'm going to scream ... 16 million years until impact you geniuses out there. that's enough for a thousand civilizations to rise and fall so stop whining and use your oh soo awesome brains)

so let me tell you that yes, the first 4 episodes a rather drama heavy with long character plots to get to know them. and yes, the CGI is not the best on the market. but that did not keep me from Doctor Who or LEX and it's sure as hell not going to keep me from anything else.

I really love the direction of the later episodes when the meta plot gets going and we get a broader picture of what is wrong with Terra Nova, Commander Taylor and the Sixers.

The acting still ranges between average and sometimes very good. episode 9 had a nice Stephen Lang moment.

give the show a try, maybe jump in the later episodes and forget about the CGI.

suspend the disbelief and just enjoy it. it's better than most of the other crap out there, and you can watch it with the whole family.

and dammit, it has Dinosaurs!

Loved the series, I just wished they gave it another season or two :(

For some reason then it took me five years to get around to watching "Terra Nova", despite the fact that a friend told me good things about it when it was showing back in 2011. But I happened to come across it in a second hand DVD store, and decided to give it a chance.

I must say that I have been missing out on something quite entertaining. Sure, while the concept idea is not original, and might actually be a rip off at certain stages, it still proved to be quite entertaining.

What worked for me here, was a myriad of things. Let's start with the concept idea of time traveling back to the prehistoric time and starting a colony, which was the focal point of the movie. That worked out quite well, and made for a good foundation for the series. Although there were some blanks here and there in the background of it all. And the storyline in the series was also quite good, lots of interesting things happening here, and the writers were good at including multiple people and families in the events that took place in and around the Terra Nova colony. And finally, the characters in the series. There was clearly a lot of thought being put into the characters, as they had good details and often an elaborate background story to be told as well.

The effects in "Terra Nova" were good, well most of the time anyway. There were some moments when the dinosaurs looked quite fake and it was painstakingly clear that it was CGI. But for most parts it was working out nicely, and the dinosaurs were well animated and looked realistic enough.

However, the driving force of "Terra Nova" was the cast. They had managed to put together a great ensemble of cast for this series. Especially Stephen Lang, he was shining in this role.

Normally I am not overly keen on Sci-Fi as per se, but creators Kelly Marcel and Craig Silverstein managed to put together something quite entertaining here with "Terra Nova".

If you haven't already seen the series, I can warmly recommend that you take the time to watch all thirteen episodes, as it is quite entertaining. I am rating "Terra Nova" a solid score of seven out of ten stars.

This show is one of my all time favourites. I've watched and rewatched it multiple times and I never get bored of it.

It'll be great if they could bring this show back, with all the original actors in the lead, of course, because they all did a fantastic job portraying their respective characters.

It still saddens me to this day that this show was never picked up for a second season. While it's far from perfect, it had a genuinely interesting concept and some fun ideas, though the execution could have used some work. I would have loved to see them potentially work some of the issues out with a second season, but unfortunately it seems we'll probably never get one.

An old show by today's standards, but just finished it and it was great! Check it out on Netflix, if you haven't already.

I am rating this a 10/10, just to help make up for some lower rankings left by others. It's really between 8.5 and 9.5. It's hard to rate a series off of 13 episodes. It's a shame this show didn't get renewed for a 2nd season. I think 26 episodes would have been sufficient in telling a better story.

It has action, drama and dinosaurs. Very futuristic, yet takes place in a prehistoric wilderness, which makes it unique. The characters are good, mainly centering around the lead character's family and Commander Taylor, who is in charge of Terra Nova. The personalities and dramas that stem from these characters aren't wildly ambitious but do a good job with mixing in the environment and creating conflict with all the dangerous elements: dinosaurs, diseases, and the Sixers (human antagonists).

I read a review on here complaining about all the plot holes. One major plot hole complaint was "why aren't the future people putting on sunscreen when they get here?" Seriously? That's your big plot hole. First of all: maybe they are and it's just such a boring addition that it's not even necessary. That would be a waste of time. Who wants to watch that? Secondly, it may be an oversight but so what? It's science fiction. Suspend your disbelief a little bit. Obviously cracks in time don't really exist, but if they did........well, that is the basis of the show. If you can't get over that and start nitpicking about sunscreen right off the bat, then maybe this show isn't for you and you should watch people crossing the street outside your window. Can't get any more real than that!

Last little fun fact: the pink ranger from the new Power Rangers is in this. Also, the new inhuman director of S.H.I.E.L.D. from Marvels Agents of SHIELD.

The whole family thing has the wrong feel for the situation. It's like they just moved there from Orange County. The teens are petulant babies. I doubt that would be the case if they had really just left an overpopulated, dangerously polluted world run by a harshly militaristic government. Why can't there be some original thinking about how people might behave in such a precarious situation with an uncertain future, dinosaur threats, and a competing population. Maybe this is a world where teens use their capable brains in new and interesting ways, rather than as trite selfish brats who need babysitting. I doubt that teens would act like that if they were in this situation. Yes, it's good to have varying levels of behavior; not everyone has to be brilliant or saintly. But behavior is influenced by situation and it should bring unique fears, force some creativity, plus there is an obvious ability to have impact in such a small population. What are the relevant issues in this world and how do they impact the inhabitants?

At first, like most folks, I was excited about this show based on the trailer, concept etc. I watched the first few episodes and realized it's a rather conservative, formulaic show clearly designed to be a family drama that was safe enough for children to watch with their parents and of a topical arrangement tolerable for most modern parents.

However, the show has developed immensely in the final few episodes of the first season. The majority of the episodes were drab, capsulated pieces of neutral television programming. However, what has developed in the last few episodes leads me to believe that this show has tremendous potential. Main Characters die, big things happen, the plot twists and thickens and the action picks up quite a bit. I still can't call the plot original at all, it's Avatar/Jurassic Park/Earth 2/Lost/Stargate all the way but who cares? Firefly was just a show based on Han Solo, The Wire is just the Sopranos over again and Law & Order...well need I say more?

In just 3 or 4 episodes, this went from a show I caught on Hulu because I couldn't sleep to a show that's now at the top of my list. Too bad they waited until the very end of the season to make the show worth while, there's a whole lotta boring episodes to sit through to get to the good stuff, that could alienate a lot of potential viewers.

Time will tell.

I was pretty excited for this show when I first saw the previews/trailers/etc. I got it on iTunes today and I'm a bit disappointed.

This show is really just your typical, clichéd family drama with some futuristic guns and a few dinosaurs. The acting is just decent and the story is actually pretty boring. The characters are all very one dimensional, boring, etc. The computer effects are sub par, which is a disappointment since they are used so often.

In short, it's just you're typical, PC Fox show. I don't know how many more of these they're going to make before they die away as a company.

Season premiere was pretty bad. Mind you the production values are quite decent with good FX and costumes and whatnot. However...

The Story? Boriiiiiing. It started very good, in a dystopian future, which seemed pretty interesting even if not the most original of settings... But it only declines from there. At the end of it all, we're in a "family drama", a very cliché one incidentally, with dinosaurs.... so yeah.

The plot is dumb. Typical dumb characters that do dumb things because there needs to happen something to fill the time of the show. The characters are dull, completely un-original, their dialogue is often cringe-inducing, and sadly, the actors that portray them don't seem to be very inspired.

It's fine to have laser guns and dinosaurs and retro-sci-fi stuff, but give us an intelligent story please. I don't want to watch another show about the estranged dad, the angsty son, the nerdy daughter, the innocent child, the worried mom, the hot girl-friend and the over-confident military guy... There seems to be only rehashed stereotype characters in this show... ugh! To be honest, this seems like a waste... it looks expensive enough, but I was expecting something less dumb. Seriously, I wanted to slap every last one of the characters silly. And then the writers...

Let's hope it picks up and quickly, but something tells me it's not going to. I'm already dreading the 'family drama of the week' pace, with a little bit of mystery to try and seem like an interesting show.

Oh well, at least we still have Fringe, we sci-fi buffs...

My biggest gripe with Terra Nova was the teen angst angle. Teens mainly get angsty when there isn't enough real hardship to keep them from dwelling on how much mommy hates them and daddy neglects them. People who spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week fighting for their lives don't have the time or energy to feel sorry for themselves. An angsty teen is a dead teen. And those around them end up dead too. Make a habit of being that problem, and everyone stops rescuing you when your life is in danger. It's the law of natural selection. Terra Nova, The 100, The Shanarra Chronicles, all have this trope going on.

Next gripe. If a faction like The Sixers splits off from the main enclave, there's no room for all these lofty ideals of mercy and second chances. You kill the enemy or you die. You need to set the moralistic horse crap by the wayside or the species ends. It's a family friendly show, so there's no need to be graphic about it. Just show the rope getting cut and fade to black as the dinosaur pounces.

All that being said, it's got dinosaurs! I would have rated it a 2, but the presence of dinosaurs bumps it up to a 6.

Terra Nova is a great show! Fox should be commended for producing a truly family-friendly series, a brave thing to do these days. Terra Nova and The Middle are about the only family- friendly shows on TV right now. Everyone else puts in sexual scenes or incidents that degrade the characters, distract from the story and jar family viewers for no reason. As Bill Cosby said, "It's like someone put red pepper flakes in the Jell-O pudding." Terra Nova doesn't do that, but still packs enough excitement to keep jaded teens interested.

(Full disclosure: I joined IMDb just so I could post this review. I'm not a big network TV fan but was lured back to network TV to check out a fairy tale show on a different network, which promised to have a "Narnia" feel to it. Alas, it has been disappointing because it has extramarital sex in every episode (Hollywood promoting its favorite fairy tale: casual sex with no emotional damage, or venereal diseases, or pregnancies.) But that got me watching network TV again, and I'd heard about Terra Nova so I checked it out. I was pleasantly surprised - and hooked.)

Four reasons why I really enjoy the show:

1. It features a functional family who are civil with each other instead of snarky and sarcastic (rare on TV, since sarcasm is a cheap way to create conflict and laughs). The family members engage in no extramarital anything. It is extremely refreshing. My teen and 5th-grader can watch it and I don't have to hide their eyes (except for some dinosaur-on-human scenes early on). The father of the family and the Commander of the colony are strong father figures, even honorable. Admittedly, this means the writers have to resort to implausible situations (like all the blackmail) to generate conflict and interesting story lines, but that's better than having to endure another parade of atrocious role models just because that makes it easy for writers to generate conflict and drama. Give Terra Nova time to learn how to generate exciting story lines without all the tawdry, cliché techniques other shows employ. Bravo, Spielberg, et al!

2. The show portrays the Cretaceous period very realistically (speaking as a lifelong dinosaur fan and a geologist). The dinosaurs aren't an invincible scourge that bullets can't stop; they don't lurk behind every tree waiting to pounce; instead, the Cretaceous is like the Serengeti - both have big animals that are dangerous if you get too close, but they can be subdued or avoided with the right approach or hardware. I like it that big animals show up only now and then, as big animals really would. Big dinos should be rare, since it takes a lot of food to maintain the big ones. Someday that nearby Brachiosaurus herd can camp around the colony; that would bring in some dinos that really could snap their fence in two without trying, and the brachs would attract the really big predators that everyone wants to see.

3. The sets are detailed and lavish. Somebody had to BUILD this colony in Australia; it's not CG! That alone makes it a pleasure to watch - it's more believable than CG. Their futuristic technology is well-designed and plausible; it forms a natural and interesting backdrop to the story. They use it, but it doesn't get in the way. Refreshing (but probably expensive).

4. Scientists, doctors, and engineers have positive roles in every episode (along with the soldiers and cops). Science or medicine helps the colony in every episode; it's vital to Terra Nova's survival. This is great because we need to inspire kids to enter scientific careers, so we can keep innovating at a rate that will be competitive with China and India now that those countries each graduate more scientists and engineers than the total of all U.S. college graduates!

Apparently the show didn't live up to the hopes of some sci-fi fans (judging by the early reviews in this series), but it is clean, positive entertainment and that's brave for Fox to offer (and they're the only ones doing it this season). Bravo for them! As to the complaint that it is unoriginal and relies on cliché plot lines and dialogue, that is true; but everything has been done before, so calling it "unoriginal" is a very unoriginal criticism. I admit the show is predictable, but I don't mind that; I've watched enough sci-fi shows in 45 years to be able to predict all of them. I watch the show for the realistic rendering of dinosaurs and the positive family role models. I say give them time; their writers deserve a chance to learn how to make the show more believable. Meanwhile, the show has enough dinosaurs and cool technology to keep kids and teens (and at least one geologist) interested.

Greetings from Lithuania.

Although there are a lot of bad stuff in this show, and you can read them in ~90% of reviews (and i totally agree with them) i somehow like this show, to be more specific, i like it very much. Going to start from the Bad:

1) clichés - tons of it, in whatever direction you look at, i don't even want to start on that ...

2) A lots of corny dialogs, (especially they're coming from cute Shannons family members). But that's not a big problem in here. Hey, not every family have to look like it stars in Rob Zombie's movie.

3) Bad (most the time) CGI of the dinosaurs (especially in the last episode). of course it's a TV but it just HAVE to look better these days.

The Good:

1) Stephen Lang. Still fresh from "Avatar", he successfully steps in to the role of a colony leader. I think, Stephen Lang's character Commander Nathaniel Taylor is a twin brother of Colonel Miles Quaritch, only the "better" brother went to work in "Terra Nova", the bad - to Pandora. Just kidding here, but you can clearly see the similarities of these characters. His speech in 8th episode "Vs." at the end in a festival on his behalf was very good and touching ("family and peaceful life, that's the whole idea of the project "Terra Nova").

2) Not overdone with "mysteries and twists" stuff. Although i like twists and mysteries in a movies and especially in the shows, I was so tired of all the mysteries and twists stuff done recently in TV shows (and we know these shows aren't we?)where they just kept throwing them at us every 5 min. and one "big" at the end of the episode (look how "Lost" lost it's magic in the middle of airing when they just finally overdone with that). "Terra Nova" plays with you straight and i liked it. And there is some interesting stuff in the end of the last episode of season one.

3) The whole idea of a show and the production qualities. The idea of people being transported back 85 million years to prehistoric Earth with a second chance to build a civilization sounds really impressive for a TV show these days. It's nothing really new, but keeps us interested in the process of doing it. And the production of this show is a first rate, a lot of work went in doing that (but not in making of dinosaurs).

Overall: 1) if you are looking for some new Emmy/G.Globes winner show, than look completely elsewhere, no awards will shine in here. 2) if your standards for a TV show are high (first rate acting, brilliant writing, tons of mysteries to the keep the wheel spinning) and every new show has to be "revolutionaly good", look somewhere else.

Otherwise you can really check out "Terra Nova" open minded and then maybe you will be waiting for a second season, as i am now.

The main problem with Terra Nova is that it had so much potential that was never realized. The show, which was quite an expensive production for network TV, needed to have amazing ratings to keep the episodes coming and sadly it never achieved those ratings and was cancelled very early on in its initial run.

The show had other problems and was never able to arrive at a great high quality level, but it showed such promise towards the end of its season. When the last episode finally ends you wish there will be a second season to answer all of the new mysteries that are revealed in the final minutes of the Resistance, but sadly there is no more Terra Nova to be had.

Overall, the performances were adequate with Stephan Lang's portrayal of Colonel Taylor probably being the best of the bunch. The stories could have had some better writing, but the plot, setting, and universe that they create is compelling and intriguing. The special effects are high quality for television and their sets are magnificent.

Had the show continued, I would have been there to see how it all unfolded for at least another season, but as it stands here, Terra Nova is relegated to dwelling in its mediocrity and could-have-beens.

I consider myself a movie buff, and I don't wander into the realm of TV very often. But when I herd about Terra Nova I was so interested I counted the days until it aired, and because I work full time and am a full time student, I subscribed to Hulu just to watch this one show. Once I saw the pilot I was hooked, have watched every episode at least twice. I love this show to me it has everything: its got some drama, some action, some mystery. OK so the CGI isn't top of the line, did you really expect it to be? I don't care what the budget is this is a show on cable! The Dinosaurs look great! maybe not perfect but great. You may say the acting is horrible or that the characters would be more intelligent, look at the world they come from, Humans in 2149 have given up, the Earth is depleted, the atmosphere is unbreathable. As the time goes by the characters almost seem to wake up, its almost like they were just husks in 2149 and Terra Nova forces them to sort of flesh out. As the plot continues the show its self fleshes out, This is a big show with a big idea, you can't expect it all to come together in the pilot. In my opinion this show got better every episode and WHEN the second season comes out it will continue to get better and better. The more I learn about Terra Nova the more I want to learn to me this show was like a drug and if that isn't the goal of a TV show tell me what is, if you don't like it thats fine go and watch something else.

It's a good series! If you like «Lost» I think you'll like this genre, too.

The acting at time is not top notch. I think this is due to the script being somewhat cliches at times and slightly over the top.

But what mentioned above is not so serious it makes it a bad show. Not at all!

It's entertaining and thrilling. And I like that it doesn't beat around the bush too much. Action and new things happen quite quickly so you don't get bored waiting for things to happen.

The special effects are good enough, but you see it's not top budget though.

Terra Nova would definitely have deserved a second series. Would have been interesting to see how it developed.

But hey; enjoy the 13 episodes there is. You could do a lot worse!

You've seen Terra Nova before, in dozens of science fiction shows and movies. There is really not a single original moment in the entire show and, alas, it doesn't seem to realize this.

The setup is a society that's on an ecological disaster (like "Blade Runner"), where a family is sent back into the past (with dinosaurs like "Jurrasic Park") to form a colony (like "Earth 2"). The family consists of a heroic father, a smart mother, an angsty son, a genius daughter (like Lisa Simpson) and a younger, cloyingly cute younger daughter. None have the depth of a cardboard cutout.

Storywise, it's a mess. There is never a moment when you can't predict accurately what will happen next. It's not even difficult to do so: when the doctor is treating an accident victim, you know she's going to say "stay with me."

It also makes no sense. People say one thing about the world, then act as though the situation is completely the opposite. The setup is ludicrous (a colony has houses like that?).

Ultimately, this is third-rate science fiction that's about as entertaining as watching a turned-off television. It may be worth it if you create a drinking game of "name the cliché," but you wouldn't make it over a half hour before passing out in a drunken stupor.

There is bad, there is terrible, and then there's Terra Nova.