Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Here’s the thing, ‘La Brea’ has an excellent plot idea – a massive sinkhole suddenly appears in Los Angeles along a road, sucking in several people, who instead of falling to their deaths, find themselves hitting the ground in a pristine unknown forest. While in Los Angeles, authorities assume the sinkhole must’ve killed people who fell through it, the surviving strangers slowly learn they might be in 10,000 BC! Will they be able to survive in a non-civilized world inhabited by sabre-toothed big cats and woolly mammoths?
Created by David Applebaum, La Brea revolves around the Harris family: pilot Gavin Harris (Eoin Macken), his estranged wife Eve Harris (Natalie Zea), and their teenage children Izzy (Zyra Gorecki) and Josh (Jack Martin). Eve and Josh fall into the sinkhole, while Gavin, plagued by visions of them in the other timeline, rallies support to launch a rescue mission for the sinkhole victims. Meanwhile, the survivors who fell into La Brea face a tough battle for survival, grappling with limited food supplies, trust issues, and mysterious, hostile natives who may want them dead.
La Brea attempts to position itself as a dystopian survival show in the vein of Lost or The Walking Dead (minus the zombies), but it lacks the grittiness expected from a strong first season. Instead, it adopts a more leisurely pace, emphasizing interpersonal dynamics among the group of survivors. Unfortunately, a disproportionate amount of screen time is devoted to Gavin Harris, the pilot hero determined to save his wife and son. His dialogues are dull, repetitive, and could easily be skipped without missing much. A lot of the other sub-plots focusing on different survivors is also very mundane and stretched out. While everybody simply wants to find a way to get back to their timeline, they survivors must also stick together to keep themselves safe from unknown dangers.
Most characters in La Brea are not very entertaining, most of them are unlikable, except for Scott Israni (Rohan Mirchandaney), a museum tour guide, who is always high, and yet is quick to realize that the survivors are inexplicably in 10,000 B.C. Rohan Mirchandaney is comically entertaining as the cowardly yet smart Scott, who quickly becomes friends with Josh Harris. A small romantic sub-plot about Josh’s crush on Riley (Veronica St. Clair), an undergrad student who fell in with her doctor father (Jon Seda), is kinda cute. It helps that both actors look good together and are charming onscreen together.
The cinematography is somewhat mediocre, the VFX on some of the extinct animals is pretty bad, and many of the sets in 10,000 BC straight-up look fake, like they were made for a new museum. Also, let’s not even get started on the costume and makeup department—some of the outfit choices and the fact that everyone looks fresh despite being stuck in the past for a while is simply ridiculous.
This is basically a “time-pass” kind of show. It has a really interesting plot, but it’s not executed with the level of cleverness the story deserves. That said, it still manages to keep you hooked through all ten episodes. Honestly, I wish they had just wrapped up the story in the tenth episode—it really didn’t need a second season. But here I am, curious enough to watch the next season anyway. If you’re in the mood for some mindless time-travel fun, this is a decent pick—you can enjoy it without analyzing all the things that make no sense.
Rating: 5.5 on 10. Stream ‘La Brea’ on Netflix or JioCinema.
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