Monday, September 26, 2011
Visually ambitious -- and emotionally ambitious, as well -- time travel with Terra Nova Monday night.
Photographed by:
Handout, Fox
The three laws of time travel into the past, as codified by the great science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, are:
1. Don't change anything in the past.
2. Don't leave anything behind.
3. Don't bring anything back.
If recent TV history teaches us anything, it's that mainstream network TV tackles time-travel tales at its own peril.
Viewers can be forgiven, then, for approaching Terra Nova -- the ballyhooed, heavily promoted time-travel thriller from movie producers Peter Chernin and Steven Spielberg and 24 writer-producers Brannon Braga and Rene Echevarria -- with a wait-and-see attitude. Over-hyped, big-budget failures like The Event and FlashForward are still fresh in the memory of viewers hoodwinked early on, only to be let down later.
That said, Terra Nova's two-hour opener features surprisingly affecting performances by Jason O'Mara and Shelley Conn as a couple desperate to escape a dystopian future world of overcrowded cities and a restrictive two-child policy. The knock on most TV sci-fi tales is that they get lost in all that spiffy technology, and lose sight of the human story.
The other knock is that they become so wrapped up in their cleverness and overweening sense of self-worth that they turn off the mainstream audience that watches down-to-earth dramas like The Good Wife, House and Grey's Anatomy.
Terra Nova hits all the right notes in its opening 17 minutes: It's tense, brooding, realistically written, well-acted and moves along at a brisk, urgent pace. The opening sequences, set in an Orwellian cityscape where it's always raining and always night, have a real sense of dread and urban desperation.
When Terra Nova jumps back in time, 85 million years, to be exact, back to the era of dinosaurs and a brave new world in the making, the tone shifts. (The actual visual image, of O'Mara's character jumping through a time portal and waking up in a primordial jungle, is breathtaking.)
The story becomes more of a relationship drama between parents and their teenage children -- Swiss Family Robinson meets Ray Bradbury. It suddenly feels hokey and cornpone, despite evidence of an ever-present threat lurking outside the guarded walls of the colony compound. It's these family scenes that hint at the series to come: Terra Nova has aspirations of being a serialized TV drama, similar in tone and feel to Spielberg's Jurassic Park films.
Fortunately, there are things to recommend it, even when the story bogs down and drags between periods of weepy sentimentality and contrived conflict.
The jungle is palpable and real, not some Hollywood back lot. Terra Nova was filmed in Queensland, Australia, and it shows. The gorgeous setting is a character in its own right, as the Hawaiian jungle was in Lost. Terra Nova is not just visually ambitious; it's emotionally ambitious, as well. It wants us, the audience, to invest real emotion in its core family of characters, and in its opening two hours, it largely succeeds. It's about starting over, not just as a society, but as a family.
Terra Nova is not exploring new ground, exactly, but TV is a better place with it.
(Citytv, FOX, Monday 8 p.m. ET/PT)
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