2020 Vision

By James Poniewozik/Vancouver

Crashed out on a pile of purple cushions in her trailer, the Woman of the Future does not look as though she could clean your clock. Yet as Max, the bioengineered heroine of Dark Angel, the dystopian sci-fi drama from Titanic's James Cameron, Jessica Alba sports skintight bodysuits and leather as, swaggering lean and feline (literally: Max has cat DNA), she dives through windows and KO's tough guys twice her size. Now, barefoot and swaddled in a massive black turtleneck and baggy jeans, it's as if she has been shrunk within her clothes.

Being superhuman, Alba says, can be a pain in the rear end. The other day, she hung for several hours from a building in a harness, sitting on two grips' heads between takes while the crew fiddled with the camera angles. She spent another marathon session hanging from a bar above the set, praying her hands didn't go numb before she dropped--"'catlike,' the director said"--into the frame. "'Then,' he said, 'You just glide over to the door.' I've never done this before! Dropping 6 ft. and not falling on my butt is an accomplishment!"

Actors, Alba among them, will always tell you it's about the craft. Being the character, living the memories, blah blah blah. Which is true--but let's not kid ourselves. Alba's role is a physical one, and not just because of the Matrix-y martial-arts scenes, for which she studied kung fu and gymnastics. In the Buffy age, you're no heroine if you're not a babe, and the curvy Alba, 19, was pegged as TV's next hot young thing a year before the show even debuted.

But there's also a thematic relevance to Alba's looks. With her wavy black hair and dulce de leche skin, she's as enigmatic racially as Max is genetically: she could be Latina, Filipina, light-skinned black or dark-skinned white. Alba, the daughter of Latino and European-American parents, says, "Max is mixed up [ethnically] just like most people in the U.S. There's no purely one race, especially here."

Yet save for the occasional Uhura (Star Trek) or Lando Calrissian (Star Wars), sci-fi has tended to look as white as space is black. Dark Angel is an exception. Cameron and his co-creator, Charles Eglee, have created a year 2020 that is intriguing (economic depression, lawlessness and authoritarianism set in after terrorists sabotage America's computers). "We said, 'Let's take our optimistic runaway prosperity and just drop-kick it,'" says Cameron. But just as captivating is the show's mix of black, brown, white and yellow faces. It was a conscious decision, says Eglee, to reflect the diversity of the setting--Seattle, icon of the new economy.

Dark Angel (Fox, Tuesdays starting Oct. 3, 9 p.m. E.T.) is also, as co-star Michael Weatherly puts it, a "gene-splicing experiment" of the styles of its two producers. Eglee, a veteran of Moonlighting and Murder One, originally thought of the show as "an urban youth ensemble." Cameron came up with the terrorist "infocalypse" and the central character--a bike-messenger-cum-thief, on the run from the military program that created her, who partners with an underground journalist named Logan (Weatherly) to search for her roots.

To help create the futuristic look, sound and culture of 2020, longtime hip-hop fan Eglee drew on that music's mix-and-match aesthetic, slang and insistent beat to capture his vision. He even got Public Enemy's Chuck D to do the theme. "We wanted a variegated sound landscape, like our human landscape," Eglee says.

Dark Angel's Seattle combines everyday anarchy with a looming dictatorial presence--which, some would say, describes a typical James Cameron movie set. But while reports of Cameron's whip-cracking approach on his sets are legion, he truly has stepped back since co-writing the first episode, leaving daily operations to Eglee. "The way to keep a show alive is to create a strong team and empower them," says Cameron. "Otherwise, if this thing's successful, I don't get to make another movie for two or three years." And he and Eglee say the series will emphasize relationships and Max's quest for identity over the expensive, peel-back-your-eyelids special-effectacle Cameron is known for. "I've never been satisfied with gadget science fiction on TV," Cameron says.

That said, this is the one fall series most likely to inspire you to buy a big-screen television. The two-hour pilot explodes with a flashback to Max's escape from a government compound in a high-volume snowmobile chase. The script is mixed: the slang can be forced, the attempts at Buffy-esque humor sometimes fall flat. But it yields up one stunning visual after another--Max perched atop a decrepit Space Needle; nine-year-old Max holding her breath under a frozen lake; Max coolly wheeling Logan down a hospital corridor as an explosion silhouettes her from behind.

What holds this bundle of dystopian dynamite together is Alba's presence. She has the grace and moves needed for all that running, rappelling and cat burgling, but with an emotional range unusual among action babes. As the morally conflicted Max, she impressively balances toughness with a sultry vulnerability--call it testostrogen--and turns within a blink from cool to coquettish as she playfully spanks a hit man she has just decked. ("Come on--you're not even trying!")

And then there's that look. Alba's Max simply looks like the future--a character who is literally the best of humankind embodied in a form that none of us can claim for our own tribe. Which, granted, may lay a tad much social import on a stylish, pumped-up, hellaciously fun comic book of a series. So let's just put it this way: we have seen the Woman of the Future, and she kicks butt.