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This is a great show for kids. They'll be sure to find it entertaining, and a lot of good information is given to them in a way that doesn't just ram it all down their throats straight from a book. Nigel's "mistakes" actually are a vehicle for giving that information, I believe, though, as I'm about to lay-out below, some of the mistakes are just plain ridiculous to make.
To that end, for the grownups, there are a few plot-holes that can become a bit distracting. If Nigel and his crew can time-travel to an exact, specific time and place repeatedly, wouldn't it be better to go back in time first to just look and see what you have to deal with, film everything you see with a timer running, then go back to the present and figure out a strategy, and THEN go back to your scene a second time and catch the dinosaurs, already KNOWING where they'll be and what they'll do? They will arrive in the exact same circumstances you saw the first time, and do exactly the same things. This method will eliminate ALL of your guesswork. I mean...really!! If you can figure out a way to time-travel, shouldn't you have enough brains to do something like this to make your hunting and capturing easier?
Other little things are annoying, too. No one would set up camp in the middle of an open space with T-rex presumed nearby! No one would walk around in a place he KNOWS to be a T-rex lair and be completely defenseless, with no weapons of any kind! No one, having just been chased by no less than THREE T-rex adults, would be "only slightly nervous and out of breath" as Nigel is! Yikes!! Most people would have had a full blown heart attack (I'm SURE I would have!), yet Nigel almost seemed to enjoy the romp...and then, later on, he goes blithely walking around in their lair, totally unarmed! He reacts in similar fashion on other episodes when he is dealing with dangerous bears, sabretooth cats, etc. That's just too much!
In the scenario on the show, Nigel is deliberately going to get the T-rex just when they will be wiped out by the asteroid anyway, so he wouldn't need to worry about altering history and possibly changing the fate of the ecosystem. Therefore, he wouldn't have to scruple about killing them to save himself in an emergency (he could, as already noted, always bail out back to the present and then try again with a better plan, and they'd be alive again!). No one would cage the pair of T-rex in a wooden enclosure, especially when it is the flimsy set up one finds on the show!). No one would let a small herd of titanosaurs roam the entire park at will; not only is it dangerous, they'll eventually blunder into all of the buildings and wreck them, not to mention crash through the T-rex and sabretooth enclosures and inadvertently "liberate" these dangerous animals! No one would cavalierly wade through Carboniferous period swamps as carelessly as Nigel does. Even when he gets a bite to the leg, he's almost totally unconcerned about the bacteria in the bite that are completely different from present-day bacteria and TOTALLY foreign to our immune systems. Speaking of bacteria (and viruses), no one explains how the beasts brought back to the present can so successfully fight off the germs of our own day; they'd be as completely defenseless here as we should be in their time.
Finally, how, exactly, does Nigel know the PRECISE day that the asteroid hit, ending the Cretaceous Period and wiping out the dinosaurs??? He couldn't possibly guess to within 10,000 years! The dating isn't anywhere near precise enough to travel to the very day such an event occurred! I could name a few more quibbles with the show, but you get the idea.
Still, as I said, the show is a pretty good "adventure" for the kids, and it's fairly entertaining for those adults who don't want to think much while viewing. For the rest, it can also be entertaining, but not always in the ways the producers intended, I'm sure! ;-)
score 7/10
magisterium 5 February 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1814496/ |
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24-2-2021 02:40:10