While The Flash’s adventures are obviously based heavily around special effects, this series continues to keep things grounded, and the fight scenes remain as exciting and well choreographed as ever. The premiere may be heavy on character development, but it also prioritizes action, and that’s not a bad thing.
The pilot of Arrow is a darkly gleaming gem. If the show can keep up its cinema-quality action sequences and maintain an air of mystery to Ollie's agenda, this could be a really fun series.
Arrow has a rather stylish neo-Goth look, and Stephen Amell (who played a dim-bulb gigolo in Hung) neatly balances his portrayal of Arrow between camp and Saturday-matinee ingenuousness.
Granted, it's all standard superhero stuff. But the action scenes are well-handled, the emotions and the characters mostly ring true, and the plot offers enough twists to keep you intrigued.
Arrow certainly looks polished (having David Nutter direct a pilot virtually insures that), but there's only so much action an hourlong drama can afford, and the characters necessary to sustain the series are, initially, strictly two-dimensional, even with the island as a go-to flashback.