That the supporting venue was the Fox Network, those specialists in cheesy "reality" TV, didn't help much.
Well, I have good news. So far, Dark Angel is an exciting, sturdily written, beautifully acted pleasure on the eyes--and I don't mean because of star Jessica Alba.
Alba plays Max, a genetically enhanced military experiment who escaped her "incubator" in the year 2009 with eleven of her "siblings." Max is a survivor--she was just made that way--and manages to grow to adulthood without falling afoul of either the law, such as it is, or the military goons searching for her and her kind.
The fact that shortly after her escape terrorists set off an electromagnetic pulse bomb that fried civilized computerdom may have helped. In any case, Max earns her living as a bicycle messenger--with occasional forays into larceny--in a world slowly recovering from total economic collapse. Life is reasonably enjoyable, until the night Max tries to burglarize the apartment of Logan Cale, a pirate TV broadcaster dedicated to exposing the corruption poisoning society. Recognizing her for what she is, he asks Max to join his crusade, using her enhanced abilities for the cause.
Max, however, isn't buying. She only wants to do her job, enjoy her friends and steal enough to finance her search for her fellow escapees--all of whom can be identified by the bar code tattooed on their neck.
The remainder of the two-hour pilot was predicatably about Max's gradually being forced to partner with the crusader and the arrival of the military creeps who want to kill or capture her. Indeed, there is nothing really unique about the basic premise of the series if you're a hardcore SF fan.
What makes Dark Angel work is that the folks in charge have wisely centered it on character rather than plot and action, although there is plenty of the latter. It's the mark of a Cameron project, that focus on the who while never losing sight of the what and where. The United States where Max lives is a nation that has fallen back into an almost feudal state. The rich profit on the labor of the poor and law enforcement has become a kind of private army for the profiteers.
Jessica Alba's choice for the part of Max was nothing less than inspired. She brings a combination of stubborn innocence and smoldering sensuality that takes what could have been a kind of post-apocalypse Buffy into a multifaceted character full of surprising quirks and sharp humor. As Cale, her "partner," Michael Weatherly rises above the do-gooder potential of his role by infusing it with equal parts altruism and ruthless opportunism. Max's nemesis, Lydecker, played with infuriating sociopathy by John Savage, is also a cut above the usual military butthead out to cover his and the government's backsides by destroying the evidence. He does it, ironically enough, by simply avoiding any human emotion. He's an efficient killing machine, period, a biological assault weapon even less human than the genetic experiments he's determined to destroy. Eliminating the escapees isn't a job for Lydecker, it's a crusade pursued with all the fanaticism of the Middle Ages.
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