Robin Hood Needs More Archery

 Well it has been a WEEK. Work has been a bit hectic, to put it lightly. But I’ve gotten a lot of books read, and I put up the Halloween list I’ve been kicking around in my head since last year, and you can read it here on Tumblr.

Anyway I recently rewatched the Ridley Scott Robin Hood movie so let’s talk about a thing that I’ve thought about.

No, it’s not about the canceled Nottingham script, get over it. Fun fact though: I did look up trick shots on Skyrim while writing this.

Robin Hood Needs More Archery

Robin Hood’s whole schtick is archery. We get that, right? We often see him do some swordplay too, but very often there are movies in which Robin Hood’s archery prowess is highlighted and then discarded by the narrative. Here’s what I mean by that: after establishing that Robin Hood is the greatest archer to ever archer, the final battle with the villain, whether it’s the Sheriff of Nottingham or Guy of Gisborne, it’s a fencing match.

And to be fair, sometimes that sword fight is marvelous.

So while watching Robin Hood (2010), I was thinking while watching the final fight that it would have been better if Robin had defeated Sir Godfrey with a bow and arrow. And then low and behold! He does, with an incredible shot. But watching the scene made me consider a really good way for a Robin Hood movie to conclude, that I don’t think I’ve seen.

[I’m not really counting it if the conclusion involves shooting a flaming arrow at a barrel of gunpowder or Greek fire or whatever–I mean that’s cool, but I don’t think Robin Hood needs to solve things with explosions either.]

Because Robin isn’t a knight–usually, anyway. If he is a knight, he’s certainly an unorthodox one. And I’d like to see a Robin Hood adaptation that leans into that idea, that Robin doesn’t go much for swords or straightforward combat because he’s not good at it, rather than most adaptations in which he just prefers bows. That we see him try and fail to be a knight with fencing, and realize that he doesn’t need to be playing by those rules anyway because that’s not who he is.

Now certainly it would be less overtly awesome than the sword fight we expect to see in the conclusions of our medieval movies, but I think they could work in other ways. And we DO have other characters in the lore who could fulfill that role of having an awesome sword or melee fight with the bad guys. Would it be so impossible to have Little John do an awesome staff-on-sword fight sequence?

Also a thing that’s been missing in a lot of Robin Hood movies since Errol Flynn: trick shots. C’mon, guys. Trick shots. Errol Flynn has the lovely bit where he splits an arrow. Ridley Scott’s movie has a couple really cool shots Robin takes at Sir Godfrey. But a lot of them only go with something like “Pins the Sheriff’s notice to the wall/tree between his fingers while he’s holding it” which is good, but we’ve seen it a lot, it’s not new.

The 2018 movie tries something different, in that it goes with the Lars Andersen school of archery (carry a bunch of arrows in hand and doing close up shots while jumping around), which is kind of cool for fight scenes but also means that there’s very few impressive shots taken from a long distance. Which is what I really want from a Robin Hood movie! The movie makes it pretty clear that it thinks the longbow is stupid when its version of Little John says it’s only good for firewood, and emphasizes being able to shoot fast at close range is better.

Nope, not really what I want. Why can’t we have a Robin who can both shoot fast in close quarters and have amazing accuracy from a long distance like a Crusades-era sniper? We know that this can be done–characters like Marvel’s Hawkeye and the CW show Arrow displayed archers who are good at both range and melee without sacrificing either. Oliver Queen, even without trick arrows, is actually a pretty good example of how they could do great fight scenes with a bow (albeit, with something smaller than a longbow).

And why this is really disappointing is because this level of awesome archery in a Robin Hood adaptation exists! It was the 2006 BBC Robin Hood! Which, okay, had its problems (and season three, which is the biggest problem the show had), but it had a lot of really cool archery shenanigans, and I’m amazed that you haven’t seen Robin Hood movies try to do anything nearly as cool as the things Robin does in that show.

[I suspect audience reception to that last season didn’t help. Which I think ALSO ended with Robin shooting a flaming arrow onto a barrel of explosives.]

One might think that people could take notes from that, and from something like Arrow, and then make some really cool cinematic scenes out of it. Alas, it hasn’t happened–yet.

Generally, a Robin Hood movie shouldn’t just be a big medieval action movie (although it should also be that), but also a movie that heavily features archery. Good archery. We should be blown away by this guy’s skill and accuracy, as well as get plenty of opportunities to see them in action.

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