Jonah Abbott
There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
Zandra
The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Zlatica
One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
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.
ThePlatteRiverKid
This could be one of the saddest movies I have ever seen because what happens but I won't give that away although it is pretty historically documented already.The Arrow is a nicely done TV movie that describes one of Canada's most magnificent contributions to aviation history as well as the Cold War, had it gone into production.The movie does make the prime minister kind of evil (although historically it wasn't totally his fault) but as far as I've researched looked to be quite on the nose. It is hard to believe that our neighbors to the north developed such an advanced jet back then (for any country) and the movie explains so very well. It also describes the financial portions of the program very well with both pluses (the sell of the Oreinda engines to France) and the drawbacks in a cold economy.It was truly a docu-drama as they threw in parts focusing in on the workers, principally Crawford Gordon but in all was an excellent portrayal of a tragic program (from a technological point-of-view).
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.
Cassius-4
The Arrow is a very dramatized version of the happenings around the Avro project.The Arrow is a real feel good movie for us Canadians. Though Dan Aykroyd has had better days, it's important that he was included in the Canadian cast, bringing a familiar face to a long forgotten subject.Just recently an original Avro Arrow model airplane was found in Lake Ontario.
