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245 of 251 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Angel - Vampire Detective With Soul, May 26, 2005
This six Disk DVD Set is extraordinary. The Picture and Sound quality are so very good that you feel as though you are watching it in a theater. The closed captioning and Audio come in other languages besides English. It's jam packed with all sorts of extra bonus specials. The Brilliant creator, Joss Whedon and other staff members are at their very best, just as they were with their work on Buffy (which is also a must own). I not only highly recommend this Season disk set, but the other four seasons as well. Quite a bit of quality work went into the making of all five seasons. They are a necessary buy for any Angel fan! It's completely impossible to be anything but extremely pleased with this purchase as well as the rest of the series. The writing, acting , directing, etc... are amazing per usual. This is without question once again feature film quality.
The fact that all but the first season is filmed in Letter Box gives it that theater feel. In addition, the closed-captioning is less likely to interfere with the picture. David Boreanaz (Angel) and Alexis Denisof (Wes), are brilliant in their performances together as well as with other cast members. I must give extra credit to Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) in her portrayal of evil Cordy. She does an exceptional job in playing the good girl gone bad without giving away this fact to the other characters. She made it look so easy and it must have been a difficult role to play given that she's used to being good Cordy on Angel. Andy Hallet (Lorne) has a brilliant singing voice as well as a talent for comedy. I love the way he's always speaking to Angel in terms of calling him odd nicknames such as crumb cake or cinnamon buns. It's hard to speak to a very masculine man and yet get away with terms that are very effeminate. He pulls it off beautifully. Amy Acker (Fred) combines a plethora of character traits with amazing talent, playing a sweet, innocent, somewhat crazy (in the beginning of her appearance), brilliant and yet very graceful and sexy woman. These are difficult qualities to combine and make it all believable. She's a really gifted actor. Let us not forget Vincent Kartheiser (Connor) as Angel and Darla's (played by the incomparable Julie Benz) son. For a very young actor he has the natural gift and talent of someone that has been in the business for many years. No matter what incarnation he is playing he does it with absolute believability and gives his all. He has a very bright future should he decide to remain in the business. Joss Whedon once again comes through with continuing to make the show interesting, believable even though it's all fantasy. He does this because he makes the people real and the stories real despite that they are all rooted in non-fiction. I not only highly recommend this Season disk set, but the other four seasons as well. Any true Angel fan must complete their set with this one. It's a keeper folks. Purchase this before it gets sold out and you miss your chance to continue your collection. ORDER IMMEDIATELY AND DON'T FORGET TO BUY SEASON FIVE WHILE YOUR AT IT. Season Five adds James Marsters (Spike) to their cast of characters, and per usual he delivers his untouchable portrayal of another vampire with a soul, yet very different from Angel. The only unfortunate loss is Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia), yet she returns for the 100th episode. That in itself is reason enough for buying season five at the same time you buy season four. You'll be very glad you did.
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189 of 206 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant but flawed - but still essential, June 23, 2004
Warning: Multiple SpoilersOf the seven seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and the five seasons of ANGEL, the former's seventh season and the latter's fourth season were the most frustrating, and most flawed. Many things were spectacularly well done, but there were also ill judged story arcs that threatened to undermine all the good things in the season. It would not be wrong to say that Season Four contained many of the best things ever witnessed in either show, as well as some of the worst things. What went right? The year started with perhaps the most extraordinary episode in the history of the series, "Deep Down." At the end of Season Three, Connor had taken what he imagined to be revenge on Angel for the death of his foster father Holtz by locking Angel in a heavy metal cage, and dropping it into the Pacific Ocean. The new season begins with a fantasy sequence in which Angel imagines himself to be at a dinner with all his friends, Connor included, only to awaken to realize he was still on the bottom of the ocean. Luckily, his estranged colleague Wesley has undertaken the search for Angel, and eventually manages to locate where he has been dropped. Throughout the season we get the same conflicted, tormented, alienated Wesley we saw at the end of Season Four, and his character is far and away one of the finest things of the season. What else went right? The season was far less episodic than any of the five seasons of the show. TV execs hate long story arcs, but there is no question that from an aesthetic point of view long arcs make a better show. There is a sense in which Season Four was one long story. Additionally, there was a great new and underutilized character in Alexa Davalos's Gwen Raiden, an outstanding bad guy in "the Beast" (impressively played by towering Czech actor Vladimir Kulich), and a fantastic three-episode arc featuring Eliza Dushku as Faith. The special effects were as good as anything ever seen in television, including some eerie sequences in which it literally rains fire from the sky and the sun is blackened out in L.A. We also witnessed what may have been the funniest episode in the history of the show (with the possible exception of Season Five's "Smile Time"), the outrageously funny "Spin the Bottle." And Angelus returned for a few episodes. The high points were very high indeed. In the light of all these delights, what was it that made it a flawed season? First and foremost, an extraordinary error in concocting the character widely known as "Evil Cordy." For whatever demented reason, it was decided originally to make Cordelia the "big bad" of Season Four, a plan that had to be scraped when Charisma Carpenter became pregnant in real life. Since her baby was due at about the time when she would have been required to fight Angel, keeping the original story arc was clearly impossible. Fans will recall that at the end of Season Three, Cordelia had been made a "higher being." In Season Four we would have found that she had been more or less duped, and would be hijacked by evil entities that would return her to do battle with Angel. Instead, they changed the story by having her have sex with Connor ("yeeecccch") and becoming pregnant with his child, who turned out to be not a child but a full grown goddess with a penchant for eating people. For me this very nearly killed all the good things in the season, since I absolutely loved Cordy's transformation from school snob early in BUFFY to heroine who made extraordinary sacrifices in her willingness to fight the good fight. I thought this a horrible misuse of her character. A second major problem with Season Four was Connor, a character that was never very well conceived and never well written. He never really gelled with the rest of the cast, and most of his scenes felt like interruptions in the action. And on top of all this, he had sex with Cordy ("yeeecccch"). It was no surprise when he was nudged out of the show at season's end. The third major flaw in the season was the character of Jasmine (played by the usually marvelous Gina Torres, who I loved in Whedon's Sci-Fi Western that year, FIREFLY). I and many other ANGEL fans found the episodes featuring Jasmine to be utterly unpleasant. Everyone becomes a mindless automaton, blindly serving her needs unless accidentally contaminated with her blood, Fred first, and then Angel, and eventually the others. This was a story line that was developed in the wake of the discovery of Charisma's pregnancy, and it did have the feeling of something that was grafted onto the season, and not an integral part of it. So, of all the years of ANGEL, this is the one with more fantastically great and horribly wretched elements. Nonetheless, it still was one of the three or four best shows on television this particular season (2002-2003), matched in my opinion by BUFFY (which suffered its own most flawed season), the prematurely cancelled FIREFLY, and the also tragically cancelled FARSCAPE. Which is to say that warts and all, it remains essential viewing. The Season Four set, which has been previously released in most of the world's regions, contains the largest set of special features yet.
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29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark Angel, September 22, 2004
I would like to preface this review by saying that the very first episode of Angel that I ever saw was Release, an episode from the middle of this season. When I saw it, I recognized that this was definitely an amazing show, for Release is one of my very favorite episodes, however I had almost no idea what was going on. I only knew four characters; Angel (David Boreanaz), or maybe I should say Angelus, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (Alexis Densiof), Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpentar), who confused me by being evil, and Faith (Eliza Dushku), who confused me by being good. Also, I thought that this was the second part of a three part episode arc involving Angelus, Angel's evil alter-ego. Man, was I wrong. This season's overall arc rivals the arcs used on shows like 24 and Alias; in order to fully understand and appreciate this season, one has to see every episode as well as most of the episodes from previous seasons.
Anyway, the season picks up sort of where we left off last year; Angel is at the bottom of the Pacific, where he was left by his son Connor (Vincent Kartheiser) and vampire hunter Justine Cooper (Laurel Holloman). Cordelia is on the higher plane of existence, Wes has been exiled from the group and is in an unhealthy relationship with Wolfram and Hart lawyer Lilah Morgan (Stephanie Romanov), Lorne (Andy Hallet) is performing in Vegas, and for the three month interim, Gunn (J. August Richards) and Fred (Amy Acker) have been searching for their two missing friends while trying to run Angel Investigations with Connor. For the past few months, Wes has been holding Justine hostage and is using her to find Angel. After Wes rescues Angel, the vamp kicks Connor out of the hotel and begins a search for his lost love Cordelia. The trio of Angel, Gunn, and Fred also start asking Wes for help more and more often. Over the summer it seems that the nerdy ex-Watcher has turned into a suave, dark, 007ish vampire hunter. Then, after a trip to Vegas to clear their heads and help rescue Lorne, the group returns to the Hyperion Hotel to discover Cordelia, who has no memory of her life. Lorne "reads" her and is horrified to see unspeakable evil in her future. Once she gets her memory back, things begin to go to Hell in L.A. Plagues of rats and snakes start occurring all over the city, and then an enormous demon made of solid rock emerges from the Earth... in the exact spot where Darla (Julie Benz) staked herself in order to bring Connor into the world. The Beast (Vladimir Kulich), as the gang calls it, causes the sky to rain fire, the performs a ritual that blocks out the sun. Things get a lot worse when the Angel Team has Angel's soul extracted in order to get information from the evil Angelus, only to learn that the Beast is taking orders from something worse. Soon, Angel's soul is stolen and Angelus escapes and runs rampant through L.A. Finally, we meet the Beastmaster, Jasmine (Gina Torres who has previously worked with Joss Whedon on Firefly), a higher being whose evil master plan is... world peace?
This year, the Angel gang faced numerous changes; Wes is now a dark, tortured, fighter, Gunn and Fred's relationship is tested to the limits, Cordy may no longer be who she used to be, Faith is now a force for good, and the L.A. branch of Wolfram and Hart is completely obliterated! The group also faces two of the most morally ambiguous challenges ever: do human sacrifices and the loss of free will justify world peace, and the other one stems from one of the show's greatest twists to date.
As I said earlier, this season is the most arc-heavy of the entire series (although year 3 is pretty intense, and year 5's arc is ingeniously the lack of an arc, but I'll get into that in the Season 5 review), and for the most part, it worked really well. Things did kind of slow down during a few episodes (in my opinion at least) such as the first Angelus episode and the first couple Jasmine episodes. However these minor problems can easily be overlooked due to the amazing overall story and the amazing individual episodes.
The acting is as good as ever; in fact I think that these actors just keep getting better. I guess the only exception is Kartheiser. He is kind of uneven; he will do very well in one episode, and then in the next one, his performance will be a little dry. Speaking of Connor, while I never truly despised him the way many fans did this season, I will admit that his constant snarl and bad attitude did get a little tiresome. The regulars weren't the only good performers. The guest stars were superb in their various roles, from Dushku's Faith to Torres' Jasmine, and from Kulich's Beast to Alyson Hannigan's Willow, who made an appearance in the episode Orpheus. Speaking of Faith, I still can't believe that she turned down a Faith spin-off show to do Tru Calling. Okay, I enjoy that show, but I believe that a Faith-based show led by Joss would have been amazing. Finally, there was Alexa Davalos, who played Gwen Raiden, a theif with an, um, electric personality. I still can't believe that Davalos didn't get used more. She definitely would have been a welcome addition to the team for Season 5 (along with James Marsters' Spike of course). Oh, and speaking of regulars, Andy Hallet finally made the opening credits after 2 and a half seasons as a guest star! Personally, I think that Hallet has gotten the short end of the stick in a lot of instances, such as being left off the DVD covers, but oh well.
One of the best things about this season was that Buffy cross-overs were allowed to happen again, despite the fact that BtVS was on UPN while this was on The WB, and the writers really made the best possible use of them. We were treated to overlapping stories (Faith and Willow, Angel taking the amulet to Sunnydale) as well as some references (Wesley talking about how the Watcher's Council no longer exists). I guess that the networks realized that this year was the last season of Buffy, so they let them have a few final crossovers.
The special effects and make-up this year probably reached their peak greatness (the show's budget was cut after this year). The Beast, the demons, and the portals all looked great.
This is, in my opinion, the best season so far (my favorite is Season 5, though). This season had great stories, great character development, and of course, great fights. The first fight with the Beast, Angel, Gunn, Wes, and Lorne was spectacular. The duels between Faith, the Beast, and Angelus were not only epic, but they were also kind of funny. And this season had probably my favorite fight of the series: Angel vs. Angelus! I wish that it had been longer. I truly believe that the writers could devote an entire episode to a duel between the two.
Pretty much every episode was good this year, so here are the best of the best: Deep Down. Spin the Bottle (the show's second funniest episode). Apocolypse, Nowish. Long Day's Journey. Awakening. Calvary. Salvage. Release. Orpheus. Inside Out. Sacrifice. Peace Out. Home. Anyway, that's the Season 4 lowdown. One season to go. See you in year 5!
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DVD ~ David Boreanaz
DVD ~ David Boreanaz
DVD ~ David Boreanaz
