Fantastic!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

This is a laudable attempt to portray the destruction of the Canadian aerospace industry by a scheming President Eisenhower and a clueless Prime Minister Diefenbaker. Unfortunately, that part isn't at all true. The Arrow was killed by cost overruns and the near-impossibility of developing a new plane, a new engine and a new radar system all at the same time. The geeky engineer character kind of annoyed me, too. The writers had him inventing about three things that were utterly crucial engineering and aerodynamics breakthroughs all by himself. Sorry, nobody's that good, not even the people who did that work in the first place. A lot of the people in the film are historical characters, some are composites. All in all, I really enjoyed this film, but the aviation geek in me gets irritated by factual errors.

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.

It's a shame that most people in the USA aren't aware of this great film, or this chapter of history, as this TV mini-series produced by the CBC (like most Canadian programming) never made it to our screens. Seeing Dan Aykroyd in this dramatic role shows how good an actor he really is, and that is more than his Saturday Night Live persona.The DVD is chock-a-block with the 3 hour film, the documentaries 'There Never was an Arrow', 'The Legend of the Arrow', 'The Plane Truth', a Dan Aykroyd interview, photo and magazine gallery, and the pilot training manual!My advise to other Americans: search for this gem and buy it!

***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.