After a lot of misfires, the WB finally hit the target* with a pilot pick up in the form of ARROW, what they are now calling Green Arrow. We don’t know why the Green part was redacted because as you can see from the cast shot, they do wear green. Guess “**** Lantern is not a phrase that is remembered fondly beneath the water tower.
Anyway here’s the first footage of Stephen Amell as Arrow.
Can he jump over chain link fences? Check
Can he investigate warehouses? Check
Can he appear shirtless? Check check
Can he peer anxiously through goggles while tinkering with equipment while accompanied by urgent string music? Check
Most important, here’s his archery form:
As you may recall, despite his smoldering demeanor in The Avengers, Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye was a fail for his crappy archery form. To our untrained eye, Amell has the back arm in good form, but the front one needs to be straighter. You’re missing a lot of power there, dude!
More Arrow stuff. Here’s the official plot synopsis from the show’s mini-site.
After a violent shipwreck, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen was missing and presumed dead for five years before being discovered alive on a remote island in the Pacific. When he returns home to Starling City, his devoted mother Moira, much-beloved sister Thea, and best friend Tommy welcome him home, but they sense Oliver has been changed by his ordeal on the island. While Oliver hides the truth about the man he’s become, he desperately wants to make amends for the actions he took as the boy he was. Most particularly, he seeks reconciliation with his former girlfriend, Laurel Lance. As Oliver reconnects with those closest to him, he secretly creates the persona of Arrow – a vigilante – to right the wrongs of his family, fight the ills of society, and restore Starling City to its former glory. By day, Oliver plays the role of a wealthy, carefree and careless philanderer he used to be – flanked by his devoted chauffeur/bodyguard, John Diggle – while carefully concealing the secret identity he turns to under cover of darkness. However, Laurel’s father, Detective Quentin Lance, is determined to arrest the vigilante operating in his city. Meanwhile, Oliver’s own mother, Moira, knows much more about the deadly shipwreck than she has let on – and is more ruthless than he could ever imagine.
The series stars Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, Colin Donnell as Tommy, Katie Cassidy as Laurel Lance, David Ramsey as John Diggle, Willa Holland as Thea Queen, with Susanna Thompson as Moira Queen and Paul Blackthorne as Detective Quentin Lance.
Based on characters appearing in comic books and graphic novels published by DC Comics, ARROW is from Bonanza Productions Inc. in association with Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (“Green Lantern,” “Brothers & Sisters”), Marc Guggenheim (“FlashForward,” “Eli Stone”), Andrew Kreisberg (“Warehouse 13,” “The Vampire Diaries”) and David Nutter (“Smallville,” “Supernatural,” “Game of Thrones”). Melissa Kellner Berman (“Eli Stone,” “Dirty Sexy Money”) is co-executive producer. The pilot was directed by David Nutter from a teleplay by Andrew Kreisberg & Marc Guggenheim, story by Greg Berlanti & Marc Guggenheim.
Pro tip: make sure it is a “violent shipwreck” which propels your character’s story arc, not just a puny one.
A Facebook page is up where you can “like” Arrow. But it is here in the Beat comments that his ultimate fate shall be decided. What say you, peanut gallery?
*oh god, please, forgive me.
Amazing how he put his bags down before climbing the fence and yet they beat him to the other side.
So far so good, but I’ll need more to like it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think his arrow is on the wrong side of his bow. Can someone confirm?
Richard,
I’m basing my assessment on this YouTube video (http://youtu.be/zjDSs5qpZCk) which I think is the same one, because I can’t actually watch the embedded video for some reason.
I’m by no means an expert, but I have been shooting with a recurve bow myself for over 20 years. His form is fairly good. It’s some of the better TV/movie archery I have seen lately. It’s hard to really tell based on the way the clip has been cut and the video quality, but I’ve spotted only three things that I would be concerned about:
1. He stores his bow fully strung. If you this with a recurve bow, you’d stretch out the string, making the bow weaker and thus less reliable. Recurves are supposed to be stored unstrung. But to be fair, I have no idea how long that bow was sitting like that. It could also be some magic superhero bow with a string that never stretches for all I know.
2. At full draw around 1:24 it looks like his has both his pinky finger and possibly his thumb on the string. This is generally discouraged (in olympic style recurve, at least) because it makes a clean release more difficult especially when one is shooting barefingered (which is also generally discouraged because it can be hell on the fingers, especially with strong bows).
3. It looks like he has an iron grip on his bow. Good for making sure you don’t lose your bow in the heat of battle. Bad for getting a consistently accurate shot. Gripping your bow that tightly will cause muscle tension in your bow arm which will often cause an archer to “jerk” the bow on release.
As for your question. He is shooting right handed (holds the bow in his left, holds the string in his right) which is why the arrow rest is on the left side of the bow. This is correct assuming he is right-eye dominant or doesn’t have a dominant eye. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any type of sighting device on that bow so he is targeting by sighting down the arrow. If the arrow were on the other side of the bow, the bow itself would obscure his view of the target. And the arrow would not go where he wants it to go.
I have replaced the WB video — which has all kinds of blocks — with the Youtube one.
Maybe they’re calling it just “Arrow” because “John Carter” was already taken.
~
Coat
Stephen Arnell?? His name is Amell.
Looking forward to checking this out. He was smoking on Dante’s Cove! :)
Sabrina – wow! Thanks for all that info. Had no idea this was so complex, and I say this as one who’s wanted to get into archery since he was a boy.
I am willing to give this a shot (ha!).
Hi, I’m the guy who wrote that piece about Hawkeye’s bad archery for Wired’s GeekDad blog. (There’s a follow-up piece to it at GeekDad; stuff that looks bad in still photos goes by too fast to notice in the movie, and I think they went in and fixed a few shots, so he didn’t look as bad as I feared he would.)
As for ARROW, here’s my commentary:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/05/cw-arrow/
Summary: Why is he shooting a child’s bow?
P.S. Anyone interested in trying archery should contact your local range or archery shop, or look at the USA Archery website (www.usarchery.org); many of them offer free lessons including equipment.