Dark Angel: The latest American action hero

By LOUISA CLEAVE

Girl power is still alive and well and her name is Jessica Alba. Alba is the 19-year-old, motorbike-riding, butt-kicking star of Dark Angel who has become American television's latest female action hero.

Viewers are not yet asking, "Buffy who?" but Alba's character Max has certainly given the vampire-slayer some competition.

Among the website fan clubs which sprang up in a matter of minutes after the show debuted in the United States was darkangeltv.com with the catch-line, "girls kick ass."

The futuristic Dark Angel is the brainchild of Terminator and Titanic director James Cameron.

The pilot episode — which cost a whopping $US10 million ($22.5million) to make — introduced us to Max and her world. Well, it's really our world 20 years from now, after an electromagnetic pulse has swept through, destroying the computers and plunging America into 1930s-like depression.

Max is a genetically enhanced human who was part of a military programme to produce a race of superwarriors. When she was nine, she escaped from her government compound and spends her newfound freedom as a parcel courier by day and burglar by night.

Max wears tight black, cat burglar-type outfits and rides a gnarly Ninja 650. She has a heart-of-gold roommate and her best friend is a lesbian on the look-out for Miss Right or Miss Right Now.

Her special powers — speed, agility, strength and zoom lens eyesight — come in pretty handy for her nocturnal activities and hustling in bar rooms.

She bumps into wheelchair-bound cyberjournalist Logan Cale (Michael Weatherly) while raiding his home of expensive artefacts.

Max is on a mission to find her fellow child escapees and he is out to fight the corrupt government which rules Cameron's futuristic world.

Of course, they team up to fight evil.

Alba has been acting since she was 12, appearing in the TV series Flipper in 1995-96, but blink and you might have missed her brief career.

She appeared in Never Been Kissed with Drew Barrymore and David Arquette, and Idle Hands.

The half-Mexican, half French-Canadian beauty recently worked on Guy Ritchie's The Sleeping Dictionary in Malaysia with Brenda Blethyn and Bob Hoskins.

Alba described her role in the movie to e-online: "My character's name is Selima, and the movie's set in the 1930s. It's a love story between Selima and a guy named Hugh Dansy. Selima's a Malaysian tribe girl and he's an English officer. In a world where they can't ever be together, they fall in love. It's that whole struggle of knowing that you can't be with your soulmate and dealing with that."

Does Alba have her own tragic love story?

"No, because I haven't actually been in love like she's been in love. But I don't usually get myself into circumstances that I know are impossible."

Alba would not lack potential suitors with her "like, I even care" attitude, bee sting-swollen lips and choice of transport.

Cameron and his co-producer pal Charles Eglee looked at 1000 women in their search for the Dark Angel lead.

"We saw every actress in Los Angeles," said Eglee. "We saw every actress in New York. We went around to college campuses. And then Jessica came in and lit up the room."

Co-star Weatherley described the actress in Entertainment Weekly: "There's total confidence in her, from her, around her. Once in a while, I look for that microchip in her head, because I think James Cameron might have created her. She might be the Billion Dollar Woman. It's like, 'what did you do with all that Titanic money, Jim?' 'I created the perfect female ... and her name is Jessica Alba'!"

And what does Alba think of all this attention?

"It's like, you can make hype out of a piece of cheese if you want to, you know? I don't get caught up in it, really. It doesn't make sense for my little brain."

Dark Angel's two-hour pilot episode was a high flyer in the US, drawing 17.3 million viewers, but it also attracted criticism about Alba's "beautiful but brain-challenged character" being more a male fantasy than a female role model.

A month into its US season and Alba was still kicking ratings butt, with an average 15.4 million viewers a week.

A media observer noted that with its big budget and great special effects — not to mention Alba's star turn — it was no wonder Dark Angel attracted young sci-fi fans.

Cameron was always confident he would attract the audience, saying early on that Dark Angel tapped into universal themes.

"Every kid coming of age feels the world they're inheriting from their parents is just this crazy place. By creating this chaotic future world, we're keying on the angst of sudden awareness or greater consciousness of the world."


Links


Darkangeltv.com