Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Very well executed

Great Film overall

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

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.

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.

This movie is quite a surprise. It tells a story I had no idea existed. It seems quite amazing it is a true story. It is as dramatic as a fictional story written to be dramatic. I missed the beginning of the movie but based on the description of the DVD I will buy a copy when I get the chance.

***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.