James Cameron's "Dark Angel," starring Jessica Marie Alba, debuted on television with the glitzy fanfare of a P. T. Barnum exhibit. It was intended to be Fox's answer to "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer," but unlike the latter show, "Dark Angel" never lived up to the potential which it displayed in the pilot episode.
The lead character, Max Guevera/X5-452 (Alba), with her enhanced feline abilities was interesting enough despite the all-too-familiar "I just wanna be normal" superhero formula lurking underneath. Gratuitous shots of Alba in a skin-tight leather outfit was undoubtedly a major selling point with the teenage male audience but cheapened the series to the level of a D. C. comic book.
The overarching plot involving super-soldiers whose DNA had been artificially engineered, inserted as fertilized eggs into the wombs of surrogate mothers, born under military supervision, and then escaped as children was interesting. This was tacked onto a futuristic setting in which a dystopian Seattle has been devastated by an electromagnetic pulse. These two premises were mildly compelling, and the show was at its best when exploring them, but the moment it would veer into bizarre subplots, it would fall from an average weekly thriller to a stinking pile of fungus.
The ensemble cast that populated the show was by far the worst failing of this short-lived series. The supporting characters were stereotypes painted in broad, one-dimensional strokes (i.e. Original Cindy) and sounded like imbeciles. The point of using slang is to make communication quicker, not to use it so much in a sing-song fashion that basic conversation becomes ridiculous. Apparently, middle-aged creators James Cameron and Charles Eglee were trying so hard to make a hip show that appealed to teenie boppers that they didn't realize being too trendy is just as detrimental as being too normal.
Coupled with the annoying overuse of rat-tat-tat-tat dialogue, a "battle of the sexes" theme existed throughout the series which could have been wickedly amusing if it hadn't usually lacked wit. Max saying lines such as, "Girls kick ass, it says so on a T-shirt" was humorous. Max saying lines such as, "Guys are the weaker sex" to a grieving widow who has just lost her beloved husband only makes the audience groan. Comedy is a difficult art. The Dark Angel writers should have remembered Mel Brooks' famous advice, "If I cut my finger, that's tragedy. If a man walks into an open sewer and dies, that's comedy."
For the action scenes in which Max displayed her "dizzying" superpowers, the Dark Angel crew often utilized a simple fast-forwarding technique. This is an effective trick if executed correctly, but instead it often came across as sped-up footage from a shaky hand-held video camera. In retrospect, far more interesting combat effects could have been created using wire stunts ala the choreography of Yuen W. Ping.
Ultimately, the corniness of "Dark Angel" became more and more insufferable; the weekly episode writing didn't improve; the characters became so posh they were snotty. Midway through the first season its Nielsen ratings began to slip. Seeing no quality improvement, viewers abandoned "Dark Angel" like rats from a sinking ship. By the second season, the once-promising series had degraded to having Max slaying Buffy-like monsters and encountering freakish mutants that seemed borrowed from X-Men comics. If only the series writers had aimed for a wider demographic audience other than teenagers and focused less on being devastatingly hip, "Dark Angel" might have lasted a few more seasons.
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