First off, let me just say that Spielberg's big new Sci Fi extravaganza is well produced and entertaining. The actors are solid, the situations are comfortably familiar and the dinosaurs look real. The sentimental moments are actually affecting (the orphaned love interest of the hero's son, watching a family embrace from a ferw feet away, gives a swift tutorial in loss and grief without saying a word). But much of the show was baffling.

 

The story opens in the toxic future with the father in jail for hitting a cop when the family was busted for having an extra child. (Two is the limit in Pollution world).  I'm already lost. How can you keep a child secret in a world with no privacy? "It's the new Tiny Tears Talking Tina! The percfect Christmas gift!"They can't even hide the kid for five minutes while the police search the house. So you think -- they had some cool ingenious way of faking out the authorities. You wait for that explanation. But don't hold your breath, even with one of those  'rebreathers' that everyone has to wear. The story is moving too fast for those trivial expository details!

 

So Dad goes to jail an we jump two years and the rest of the family (except the illegal toddler) are off to the 85 million years ago to rebuild the human race in the Cretacious era. All Dad has to do to join them is "break out of one high security prison and into another one" as his predictably rebellious teen-age son puts it. That sets up a whole movie's worth of cool plotting and Mission Impossible-style hi-jinks. Wait for them ... but again without hilding your breath. We never even see Dad escape from jail, thouugh Mom manages to smuggle a high tech laser doo-hickey in to him -- how did she work that? It's in a rebreather,  a luxury item it seems like prisoners aren't allowed to have. But they let him take it, anyway. Mom says "He's dying in here!" with all the unfiltered air. But it's been two years. How did he survive? Pick, pick,  pick. Anyway, he escpes somehow, and gets some hightech stuff to allow him through the high security at the time travel place. How did he get that? It's all very sophisticated and expensive, and he's been in jail. Oh well. Onward. He hooks up with some guy who has the kid in a bag (guess he didnl't need to break into the state orphanage, or whatever it was) and then fakes his way into the time travel line, beats some guards up and jumps through. How could this ever happen? The people who made the show don't care and you're not supposed to either. They trhwo us one bone: "No one escapes from blah blah high tech jail without help from the outside" The prehistoric leader dude points out. Yeah, I guess so. But from where? I'd say the writer's room at Fox. 

 

So now we're back in prehistoric times, where the moon is much closer to Earth than it is now (I expected to see Elliot biking  across it with ET in the handelbar basket). The encampment is well stocked with high-tech stuff and life is good, but eventually these people will be on their own, right? And how will the human race fix itself when there are already two factions who hate each other for no particular reason, and the leasder can't even get along with his owen kid? And if they're in a different 'time stream" that will have No "Ray-Bradbury-butterfly" effect on our world, why bother? If it's all about string theory and alternate universes, there are probably thousands of 'alternate earths' where we didn't screw things up already.

 

But it's all moot, becauase of my last question: aren't they all going be wiped out by the big meteorite  that took out the dinosaurs?  I mean we know that happened. So why walk into it? That's kind of like traveling back in time to book your honeymoon on the Titanic.

 

I don't think they thought this one through too carefully. 

But I'll keep watching.

It's big stupid fun, and there's something to be said for that.