EarDelightBase Waste of Money.

Wordiezett So much average

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

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.

rpickett In 1959 Canada cancelled the production of the Arrow. It was an Airplane 20 years ahead of it's time. The 7 flyable Arrows were cut up for scrap. Dan Ackroyd does a terrific job portraying the man behind the design and construction of the "plane that never was". The movie tracks the team that designed the Arrow and delves into the many personalities from designers to production workers who worked on this project. The movie also gives historical film clips of the actual test flights of the aircraft as it was being tested. These in themselves are worth the price of the movie. Everyone should see this movie, not only for the quality production but also for it's historical significance. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

gmr-4 in having a crack at the C.B.C. out of Windsor. I watch it all the time.*** POSSIBLE SPOILERS ***THE ARROW is based upon a story of which I was ignorant, no aviation expert, but it has inspired further study. Knowing something of Canadian history, I too find the anti-Progressive-Conservative angle in THE ARROW a bit much. They could have shown something of the Government point of view in the recession of 1958-9, and the serious doubts emerging about Canada's fiscal ability to build, deploy, and maintain such an armada. Also, the knock-out redhead engineeress played by Botsford does seem to find her way into a awful lot of prominent places in scenes, a function more of the gender of one of the co-producers than any weight of female contribution to the project. Ackroyd does fine work, but how close to Gordon that rendering is . . . cannot say. I agree with another writer that Eisenhower is not done well at all, and certainly the Canadian stable of actors could have provided a man better suited if less well known. I have it on decent authority that Chamberlin was not a quirky as depicted, and were he alive in 1997 he would be offended. Oh yes: the is NO WAY the Arrow could have reached the edge of space.All said, however, I found THE ARROW genuinely moving in places, and understand the mythic proportion it has come to occupy in Canadian history and that people's sense of national accomplishment as well as the bitterness from the airplane's cancellation in subsequent decades. It is good that someone put it on film.

chuck-white too many artistic liberties were taken with the real history of the arrow in order to make it more palatable for tv audiences, which resulted in what should have been a fine movie being nothing more than tv garbage