While The Terminator movies have gone from bad to worse in recent decades, James Cameron’s forgotten sci-fi series from the early 2000s remains criminally underrated. James Cameron’s screen career might seem like one of the most unambiguously impressive runs in Hollywood history, but a closer look proves that the iconic writer/ director is not entirely incapable of making a flop from time to time.
Although he disowned the movie thanks to executive meddling, Cameron’s first feature as director isn’t 1984’s classic sci-fi horror The Terminator, but rather the comically bad monster movie sequel Piranha II: The Spawning. Similarly, while Cameron himself didn’t direct Robert Rodriguez’s 2019 mecha movie Alita: Battle Angel, he did produce and write the divisive cyberpunk blockbuster. Again, Alita: Battle Angel was hardly a failure and Piranha II: The Spawning isn’t generally viewed as a Cameron movie, but these movies nonetheless prove Cameron’s career track record isn’t as flawless as it sometimes seems.
Similarly, a mere glance at the Terminator franchise’s trajectory proves that not all of Cameron’s ambitious swings pay off. To be fair, the two Terminator movies that Cameron himself wrote and directed, 1984’s original The Terminator and 1991’s first sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day, are universally hailed as masterpieces. However, as early as 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the franchise was on shaky ground, and none of its movies since 2000 have managed to outdo Cameron’s underrated sci-fi TV series, Dark Angel.
James Cameron’s Dark Angel Beats Every 21st Century Terminator Movie By Some Distance
Although Netflix’s anime spinoff Terminator Zero is superb, The Terminator franchise’s box office releases leave a lot to be desired. 2009’s Terminator: Salvation was a muddy, post-apocalyptic mess that felt more like an overstuffed, sanitized Mad Max movie than a true Terminator sequel, while 2015’s Terminator: Genysis pointlessly rebooted the entire franchise timeline and wasted Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke in its lead role.
Although 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate had a few cool action sequences, director Tim Miller’s reboot couldn’t salvage the franchise despite a Story By credit for Cameron and another hard reboot of the timeline. Luckily, the underrated 43-episode sci-fi action series Dark Angel proves that Cameron can make a killer Terminator follow-up, provided the show isn’t officially part of the franchise he started back in 1984.
Set in the then-near future of 2019, Dark Angel stars Jessica Alba as the biologically enhanced super soldier Max. After escaping from a government facility, Max attempts to live a normal life in dystopian Seattle, but must elude shadowy military operatives who are trying to track her down. As the show continues, Max starts searching for her fellow escaped super soldier prototypes, hoping to find answers about the program they were part of.
Dark Angel Was Years Ahead Of Its Time
While this plot summary sounds as much like a Blade Runner sequel as a Terminator show, that’s a big part of what made Dark Angel so great. The series humanized the perspective of its biologically enhanced super soldier protagonist, something The Terminator franchise attempted with its cybernetic assassins various points, but was never quite able to pull off to the same extent.
Decades later, when shows like Westworld, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and Humans have thoroughly explored the cyborg experience, Dark Angel’s innovations may seem old hat. However, looking back, it is clear that making the show’s heroine a genetically engineered soldier was a daring move at the time, as this allowed the series to interrogate the blurred boundaries between human consciousness and artificial enhancements.
Years before Netflix’s cyberpunk classic Altered Carbon had humans transferring their consciousnesses into new bodies to cheat death, Dark Angel was confronting viewers with the question of how human an enhanced super soldier’s mind could potentially be. In the process, James Cameron’s Dark Angel ironically proved that the greatest Terminator sequel of the last 26 years was an entirely unofficial one.