Steineded How sad is this?

SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

doxtorray The Arrow is a compelling story of inventive and persistent people who strive to make an "impossible" airplane. Overcoming setback after setback, a team of Canadian engineers, managers and workers create one of the fastest and most capable fighter-interceptors in the world. This somewhat fictionalized miniseries effectively pulls the viewer into their struggles, much as "From The Earth To The Moon" created a feeling for the efforts behind the U.S. Apollo program. Indeed, the parallels between the American Apollo program and the Canadian Arrow program are subtly drawn several times in the film (many of the engineers who worked on the Arrow went stateside to work on the Saturn V and the Lunar Module). About halfway through the 3-hour film, it becomes apparent that the true challenges to the Arrow project are not engineering or practical problems, but political realities. Unlike the journey to the moon, the goal of building the world's greatest airplane cannot survive the conflicts of personalities, vagaries of public opinion, and budget overruns that plague any huge engineering project.The film effectively depicts the drama of the project. However, even if one overlooks the factual discrepancies, the film suffers from a few flaws: 1) The film is a bit slow in some places, and certainly feels as if it were padded to fill the time for a two-part miniseries. If it had been paced differently, or edited down by 30 minutes or so, it certainly would have flowed better. 2) While most of the characters are based on real people, and indeed seem fleshed-out rather well, the film also includes a composite character, representing all the female workers on the Arrow project. This character seems artificial and out of place; much like the Charlton Heston character in the movie Midway, she seems to be everywhere doing everything, and thus comes across as a caricature. This is not helped by the performance of Sara Botsford, who seems to be playing the role as if she is thinking, "my character is 50% of the population, dammit." 3) Some of the other casting seems odd. For example, Michael Moriarty is a fine actor, but he is singularly unconvincing as Ike.Despite its flaws, this is an entertaining and inspiring film if you enjoy stories of people who strive to achieve.

Canvoodoo For those that don't know the history, the Avro Arrow project was a Canadian interceptor project from the late 1950s. It was cancelled due to excessive cost, and to a perception that interceptor aircraft were obsolete in the wake of Sputnik and the development of ICBMs. Subsequently, the Arrow program has become the basis of a Canadian cottage industry of book publishing and conspiracy theory about why the cancellation occurred, the involvement of the *dastardly Americans*, the downfall of the Canadian aircraft industry, etc.This program is interesting in many respects -- most particularly the use of CGI to show what a flying Arrow would have looked like, and the use of a near-full scale mock up of an Arrow as set dressing in many scenes. (The Arrow was a *very* large aircraft, and building a mock up was a major proposition). Genuine archive footage of the original Arrow is also used. The set design does a good job of setting the scene for the story.Where the program falls down is in the story itself. Some posters here have suggested that history needs to be mythologized a bit to make it palatable/interesting. I don't agree with this as a general rule, and certainly not in this case, as the story is every bit as interesting just as it occurred. I understand the need to compress characters and keep a story simple enough to fit in a reasonable duration, but there's no need to generate a whole pile of total fiction to fill out the story. The important issue is that many people who watch this program will think that it's 100% historically accurate -- An impression that the program doesn't try very hard to correct. The story is very heavily fictionalized, and diverges significantly from the established history.The one good part of all this is that one of the extras on the DVD release of "The Arrow" is the one hour CBC documentary "Dateline -- There Never was an Arrow" from 1980. This is probably the most informative and balanced examination of the Arrow program, and was unavailable for many years. If you want some light entertainment, watch "The Arrow" -- It's not bad, just don't take the story seriously. If you want to know the true history, see the "Dateline" documentary, or the Avro Arrow book by Ron Page et. al. from Boston Mills Press.

bdavis-5 ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** 7/10. I loved The Arrow, but I have to admit its shortcomings. This film has a lot of faults, but the film producers, like the plane manufacturer itself, had an uphill battle just trying to get this four-hour mini-series made. It looks like Dan Ackroyd is ideal for playing Avro president Crawford Gordon, and I understand that Ackroyd as a child actually met Gordon. The rest of the cast play sympathetic characters well, although I don't know how true to life they are. However, Robert Haley and Michael Moriarty do bad impressions of John Diefenbaker and Dwight Eisenhower, which is a shame given Dief's real-life colour. The political bias shown against the Conservative Party and for the Liberal Party is a little shocking. Much dramatic license is taken with the actual story. *** Spoilers Follow *** Computerized piloting was not really included in the final prototype planes. The real design called for the planes to be fitted with nuclear missiles, but that detail is conveniently omitted from the story. There were actually no key leaders at Avro who were female, so the charming Sara Botsford is inserted for gender balance and romantic interest as a key, single-mother engineer. However, I found out about these dramatizations because the show impressed me so much that I read the non-fiction book that it was based on. Therefore, I have to admit that the show works for me. If you like invention stories, then you should like The Arrow. If you are a Canadian who has some patriotism, then know that this is one of those rare specimens that appeal to Canadian patriotism. After the catastrophic way in which the Arrow project ended, I found nothing so poignant and bittersweet as the long list shown before the closing credits of Avro talent that left Canada to help lead the development of Apollo, Concorde, and the Space Shuttle.

william_t This is one of the best mini-series I have ever watched. It's portrayal of Crawford Gordon as a man who, as the Arrow project descends into chaos, becomes a heavy drinker, is amazing. Dan Aykroyd plays this part brilliantly.It is the most accurate picture of the 1950's political climate and shows how much sway the President of the United States had over Canada at the time.If you have the chance, you should watch this series, because it will change your view of the Cold War.