While not perfect, this first season of Arrow certainly is very entertaining: it is packed with action, intrigues and not-too-shallow-characters (even though they are not great, yet?).
The main criticism if have are the following:
1. the Green Arrow is depicted as a poor copy of Batman (boy/man lives through traumatic events, hides his vigilanty identity under the cover of a billionaire, lives in a huge castle to name the most important parallels).
2. all the female characters look like supermodels! I mean come on, even for a comic adaption this is incredible unbelievable. I can't shake the feeling that the producers want to attract teenage boys to the series by casting gorgeous looking women (something that works as I know from my own experience: back in the days I watched Charmed not because it was good but because it had Alyssa Milano in)! I think it would be wise to rethink this decision because it is really annoying that they all look better suited for the cat walk than working as attorney, IT girl, boss of global enterprises, waitresses, and so forth and so on.
3. nobody seems to recognize Ollie Queen under his hood. This is just laughable as his face can be seen on a lot of the crime scenes. I didn't like that fact about Batman / Bruce Wayne and he at least wears a mask, but the hood of Green Arrow isn't cutting it for me.
Besides Jack Nicholson not starring in this version of Stephen King's book's adaption, this version is superior to Stanley Cubrick's one IMHO: it is scarier, it keeps closer to the book (which is a good thing) and it does not have an aweful cast (with the exception of Jack Nicholson missing, did I metion that already? ;-))!
However, there are certain things I did not like about it: the special effects of the animated topiary animals are just laughable! Why do them at all if they look that crappy? Some of the dialogues are laughable, too, espcially towards the ending. And it somehow just takes to long without build up much suspense. The ending is somewhat anti-climatic IMHO and I do not get whe King (who wrote the screen play) opted for that?!
All in all I would say it is a mediocre movie that has some really good moments in the middle part. Probably never going to watch it again and would recommend to read the book over watching this movie. However, if you have to watch a Shining movies I would recommend you to pick this one instead of Cubrick's!
While The Office cannot quite reach the brilliance of Friends, Scrubs or Big Bang Theory IMHO, none-the-less it is definitively one of my all-time favorite sitcoms.
One of the best series I know and unbelievable that they decided to cancel it after only ONE season!
