Terra Nova review

See, I`m going strong in my backlog, I finally watched a 4 year old series now...

Terra Nova, to the uninitiated, is perhaps best described as the love child of Jurassic Park and Avatar, it even shares Stephen Lang with the last one.

In 2149, Earth is dying as it`s resources are running out, and to try and save humanity, colonists are send out.  Or better said, send back.  Because thanks to a one directional timerift, they can be transported back 85 million years into the past, to the age of the dinosaur.

The Shannon family is one such family of colonists that leave the future behind on the 10th Pilgrimmage, and find themselves in a flourishing colony led by commander Nathaniel Taylor.  But soon they learn that not everything is peace and quiet, as during the 6th pilgrimmage a group of dissidents came along.  Known as the Sixers, they are there employed by a corporation from the future to overtake Taylor and set up for strip mining the past to bring wealth to the future.

In orde to make this possible, Taylor`s son, also working for this conglomerate, is working on a way to reverse the time portal, to be able to allow travel in both directions.  Though he eventually manages to do this, the colonists fight off the invaders and secure their new home, but then a new mystery opens as an 18th century ship bow is found in an area called the Badlands...

... and we will never know what comes next as the series got cancelled after it`s initial 13 episode run.  Yes, even Steven Spielberg himself produced series are not axing immune, but it is safe to assume that series two would involve at least another portal.

It wasn`t in all a bad series, though the special effects at times showed their limited budget.  However, in my opinion it came just a bit to soon.  2010 / 2011 where bad years for sci-fi, as the genre was falling back then (Destiny anyone?) in popularity, something which has only recently been on the rise again and mostly thanks to superhero shows and to an extent Doctor Who.  But in those years, if you weren`t a walking dead guy, you where not in the high ratings.

And I loved Jason O`Mara as police officer Jim Shannon, he had a sort of `vibe` going that reminded of the young Mel Gibson in his Mad Max and Lethal Weapon days.