Dark Angel - it's not dark, and there's no angels
01/11/2000 . Source: Jessica Martin 

Does this new TV series cut the mustard?

Buy Dark Angel in the USA - or Buy Dark Angel in the UK

The movie Titanic was about a monstrous disaster sinking, made by James 'The Abyss' Cameron. His latest SF TV series may not feature Leonardo Dicaprio, but there's been plenty of newsgroup speculation that this series might sink almost as rapidly as the big T.

It's a situation made more humorous by the involvement of JC's chum, Charles Eglee. If we mentioned the fact that he was the brains trust behind Piranha II: The Spawning …. well, nuff said.

So what's the plot about then? Well, a lot of cruel wags have compared this to Barb Wire without the obvious charms of Pamela Anderson. The heroine of Dark Angel is a lass called Max (hmm, whenever a female lead gets a male name, you know you're heading into cutey cute territory) - played by Jessica Alba.

In case the Dark bit of the Dark Angel title didn't give it away, this new TV series is treading firmly on Gibsonesque cyberpunk territory. Max is a gene enhanced superhuman - the cast off a Wolverine-style military project to clone an expendable and easy to replace super solider. It's all a bit reminiscent of one of Heinlein's last novels, Friday (except, of course, we enjoyed reading Friday).

Max - think Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a touch of Mad Max - lives in 2019 Seattle after the near collapse of civilisation in the USA (is there civilisation in Europe or Japan, who cares, certainly not the plot, that's for sure).

The US has collapsed after the East Coast was devastated by a terrorist nuclear pulse weapon which did to Wall Street was 006 was trying to do to London in a certain Bond movie with Sean Bean (you know, the first one to star Brosnan).

The internet is wiped of most of its data, as is the New York stock market … so its hello global economic collapse, and welcome to the collapse of central government. The US does a Yugoslavia and reverts to a feudal city-state kind of arrangement … again, kind of like Barb Wire.

The teenage super soldiers have escaped from their Federal scientist owners and are on the run, trying to keep a low profile just like, well, Roswell High. To keep things interesting, Max is fed missions by a crusading journalist, Logan Cale, who contacts her via cyberspace (he's on so many hit lists for pissing off the great and the good that this is the only way he can stay alive) … Charlies Angels, anyone?

Cameron has admitted that he's tried to give the series a faux 1930s feel (shades of Bladerunner methinks), not least because he's modelled the 2019 depression on the Great Depression of the 1930s - gangsters, expensive cars, speak easys, fascism, Casablanca, soup kitchen queues, and mass unemployment mixed with middle-class vagrancy.

What can we say about this series except the Director of the pilot was called David Nutter.

Nuff said, indeed.