Primeval: New World

The sets are somewhat spartan, and the cast of investigators almost uniformly young and good looking (a token geezer gets eviscerated early on), never a good sign if big budgets and verisimilitude are your thing. Yet the animals that matter look terrifyingly real, and the prospect of watching the human cast try to put the ferocious visitors back where they came from before "history unravels" is exciting.

Ultimately, both series [Sinbad and Primeval: New World] are the TV equivalent of summer beach reading: popcorn fun while they last, but don't expect a lasting impression.

The CGI dinosaur renderings vary in quality, but the plot is fairly predictable from the get-go.

An otherwise drab reboot of the British series that earned acclaim during its intermittent run on BBC America.

It is very, very bad. And yet: Dinosaurs! [31 May/7 Jun 2013, p.131]

There's no real chemistry among the cast--or much of a plot.

Primeval, by contrast, makes the original series look like “King Kong” by comparison--not because the visual effects are bad, but because the plotting is so wooden that the human characters are about as interesting as impalas grazing in an open plain.

The CGI stuff is cool; if only the acting were half as realistic.