Arrow: Pilot

Mannequins?

Arrow: Pilot
The CW
October 10, 2012
Action
DVD
D

I found this laughably bad and stilted-- writing (three writers I hope to never see again), directing (David Nutter), acting-- and on top of that I don't care about some billionaire "pretty boy" (Stephen Amell, actually meh but I know he's supposed to be incredibly handsome) who turns out to be a superhero after being marooned on an island for five years.  To be honest, I can't even tell what his super powers are supposed to be, other than strength and archery (hence the title, which I guess is supposed to be snappier than "Green Arrow").  So I can't mark this as sci-fi or fantasy.  (And, no, I haven't read the comics or encountered the character in any other format.)

Limiting myself to ten more complaints:

1. The dialogue rarely sounds like human speech, and I can't even picture it in dialogue bubbles;
2. The delivery of the dialogue makes it sound even worse, with the worst reading being the hero's "I know you want to sleep with my mother, Walter" sounding like his mom is named Walter;
3. The comic relief best friend gets sleazy lines by and about him, including "Have you noticed how hot your [incidentally 17-year-old] sister has gotten?  Not that I have" and a joke about this guy roofying someone at a party;
4. There's that annoying modernistic action filming style, where things are sped up, shaken, and/or grayed out;
5. The exposition is clunky as hell, like the black-pretty-girl lawyer telling the white-pretty-girl lawyer (of whom more in a moment) that they're best friends;
6. The white-pretty-girl lawyer is the ex-girlfriend of the hero, who was cheating on her with her sister, whom he was unable to save from drowning;
7. The hero pretends to have gone from bad to worse, rather than reforming, in order to protect the WPGL, but Amell is such a bad actor that there's not much difference between him conveying sincerity and bluffing;
8. The father of the hero has Big Secrets and shoots another man and himself in the lifeboat, which presumably adds to the heroic arc;
9. The hero was stuck on that island for, as we're repeatedly reminded, five years, thus missing the election of a black president and the rise (but not yet fall) of Twilight, and this is just dropped in to show how much things have changed but it has no resonance;
10. The "twist" at the end shows that the mother might be a bad guy, but who cares at this point?

I'd go lower with the grade, since this is arguably a worse show than Alphas, but I enjoyed it more, even if my enjoyment entirely took the form of snarking.  Alphas in comparison is better made, but I despised it, while this is just fluff masquerading as edge.