Steven Spielberg is a gifted filmmaker. He has a rather insipid worldview, which limits his capacity for greatness, but what he does well, he does very well.
As such, I was expecting Terra Nova to be better. The basic problem with Terra Nova is painfully obvious: why set a drama 85 million years in the past if you take so little interest in what the world was (allegedly) like back then?
What should logically be driving the overall storyline is exploration of this vast lost world from the primordial past. Discovering the weird, fascinating, long-extinct wildlife. Discovering the strange, awesome primeval landscapes.
But, apparently, Spielberg has no genuine scientific curiosity. In a way, that makes sense. Science fiction is fictitious. His interest lies in fantasy, not reality.
So there’s no real sense of adventure. We don’t get to see much of this ancient sprawling world. Just the opposite. It’s basically cowboys and Indians set in the jungle. The action centers on the fort. So it’s a very small provincial world. A few miles in radius.
You could put the stock characters and hackneyed subplots in just about any time and place. Why then? Why there?
And the failure of artistic imagination makes the viewer focus on other inanities. Why is it so hard to kill a dinosaur? Shouldn’t 2149 technology be more efficient?
I've been enjoying Terra Nova, but only because I'm watching it with friends. I wouldn't bother if there wasn't that element of comraderie. In fact, what would the point without other people to joke with about all the show's problems?
ReplyDeleteI think Spielberg feels he's done the exploration of dinosaurs thing. Fair enough. Three movies was two too many. But when, as you say, why bother with the ancient past setting?
The obvious answer is that it's America's answer to Primeval, which while much cheaper is a vastly better show (mostly because of the brilliant Ben Miller).
Terra Nova contains Spielberg's trademark child character(s). But they're not developed, and you don't see the world from their point of view, so they're just wasted airtime.
I like Commander Taylor. He has an interestingly violent past, but it hasn't made him a violent man. Rather, he's a man who can make hard decisions for the good of the community, and be the bad guy if he has to be. His second, Washington, is interesting too, but completely underused; basically just a grunt.
On the other hand, the "main" character, Jim, is just a reckless fool. He routinely disobeys orders just because he feels like it. Yet it seems we're supposed to be rooting for him.
His wife is just boring. She's supposed to be a brilliant doctor. But she just comes across as a GP. Maybe they thought that anyone with a British accent sounds 100% more intelligent. I dunno if that works for American audiences, but it doesn't for me. She mostly spends her time complaining about her husband as far as I can tell.
Josh is basically his father, but without the benefit of being a hard-ass. He's a typical quasi-emo tryhard, and it's utterly unbelievable that Skye would have any interest in him. Skye is a moderately interesting character herself, but they've refused to develop that, instead choosing to titillate the audience with views of her panties.
Plus there are other uninteresting characters. The main problem with the show is too many characters with too little interest. For all its flaws, Stargate SG1 really stood out as a character show because of its solid four-person core cast. The characters all fit certain archetypes, and they all related well to each other.
Fringe, another show I enjoy despite its patent absurdity, has a similar dynamic. As did Buffy, and I think most of the best shows.
I don't really know why I posted this diatribe, but it felt good ;P
I've not watched Terra Nova, so I cannot offer a specific opinion. I did, however latch onto one thing you said:
ReplyDelete"Science fiction is fictitious. His interest lies in fantasy, not reality."
Actually, good science fiction is NOT fantasy, but is based on real science, albeit most times extrapolated beyond current knowledge (i.e. "What if we could travel faster than light?" or "What if we could manipulate gravity?").
You made an analogy to Cowboys and Indians. If you were watching a Western, and all of the Indians wore Japanese Samurai armor and fought with submachine guns, you would know that you were not dealing with a film set in the American West circa 1890, but with some sort of fantasized re-imaging. Not saying it might not be fun, but it wouldn't be a "Western" in the classic sense.
The biggest problem I have with most Hollywood "SciFi" is that they know nothing about science at all. If a director was hired to do an historical drama, but refused to learn anything about the period of history in which the drama was set, he should be fired and replaced with someone with some brains. The same should be done in science fiction, when you find out that your writer/director/etc. has no interest in science.
I expounded on this subject a while back over at my blog, if anyone is interested.
Squirrel