But then something snapped -- possibly his marriage, don't ask me which one -- and Cameron started giving us women like Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's bitchy ex-wife in "The Abyss," and Jamie Lee Curtis' mousy, suspicious wife in "True Lies" (a hideous Schwarzenegger picture with a plot that hinges on the humiliation of Curtis' character).

And now, in Cameron's new Fox sci-fi action series "Dark Angel," the heroine isn't a grown-up woman at all, but a preternaturally ripe 'n' sexy teenage girl. In the two-hour series pilot (airing 9 p.m. Tuesday), which Cameron created and wrote with Charles Eglee ("Murder One"), director David Nutter's camera repeatedly takes a lazy, lingering crawl up the Lara Croft curves of the show's 19-year-old star, Jessica Alba. If I had a nickel for every time Alba's big, knowing, kinderwhore eyes and pillowy Angelina Jolie lips filled the screen, I could buy a round of Bazooka for the house.

Alba plays Max, a genetically engineered prototype for a race of superhumans. Tuesday's episode opens with the 9-year-old Max and a dozen other superchildren, all with shaven heads and bar codes on the backs of their necks, fleeing barefoot across the snow from a secret government lab in Wyoming. Armed military goons give chase: Some of the kids get shot with stun guns; others are dragged away bound and gagged. It's a tender, lovely scene. Max makes it to freedom with the help of a mysterious woman who finds her on the road and hides her in her car.

Flash forward to Seattle, 2019. Max tears around the post-apocalyptic (terrorists, an electromagnetic pulse, stock-market crash, don't ask) Emerald City on a big motorcycle, wearing a skin-tight catsuit and a heavy-lidded smirk. Max has a day job at a bike messenger service, where she toils with sidekicks from Central Post-Apocalypse Casting -- one Rasta, one coward, one stud, one sassy black lesbian. (Wait a minute, weren't those the sidekicks from "Aliens"?)

Max's pals know she's "different," but they don't know how different. She has super strength, super speed, super agility and she can even memorize long, complicated phone numbers, a trait that superhumans of the future would find especially handy, what with all this annoying splitting and overlaying of area codes. Max is also secretly searching for her "siblings" from the lab, but she's being hunted herself by the sinister head of the project's security force, Lydecker (John Savage, wearing an imaginary Snidely Whiplash mustache).

Through a chance meeting (OK, she was robbing a house), Max is befriended by Eyes Only (Michael Weatherly), a "cyberjournalist" who's fomenting a rebellion against the corrupt political and military leaders who now run the country. He offers to help her find the other escapees, if she'll help his cause. Like every other man in Max's universe, Eyes Only is captivated by her looks. He leads her to a mirror and strokes her face, telling her she's "exquisite." Whatever -- Max is, like, too cool to care. At least that's the bored front she puts up. She's such a rip-off of Faith from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the feral, haunted bad girl who just wants to be loved, it's not funny. Well, actually, it is.

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