Archery in Popular Culture

Archery is living its renaissance. Since it got  focus in the beginning of the XXth century by the amazing story of Ishi the last yahi Indian, in the USA and Europe it was established as a Sport and as a great hobby in many of its variation: Field Archery, Traditional Archery (this is what we do at Falcon Archery Malta), Hunting, etc.

The popularity of the topic made it to the movies as well, in the last few decades we have seen a good dozen of variations of Robin Hood movies and many movies use archery as a special effect.

One of the latest movies are The Hunger Games, where the main character, Katniss Everdeen’s (Jennifer Lawrence) special skill is that she is deadly with the bow. Beyond the story, the fact itself that she is shooting with a bow makes her character very cool. Now if we look at the movie from the archery point of view, she was actually trained by Khatuna Lorig, Olympic archer. Well, trained but just to a certain extent. Jennifer had hardly a few dozens of shots for a couple of days before filming the first episode of Hunger Games. One can see that if makes a closer look on the pictures about her shooting. Also it is interesting to note, that Katniss actually depicting in the movie almost perfectly what a traditional archer would do as archery. But Jennifer was trained by an Olympic archer, who might have not been well experienced with combat, hunting situations – so the technique she thought is different.

Now looking at the trailer of the latest installment of the movie, The Hunger Games Mockingjay – Part 1,  that is out 20/11/2014 in the UK and 21/11/2014 in the US – there is a scene where Katniss shots down a plane with an arrow. While one can argue if that is possible in real life or not, one thing is for sure, her posture and the way how she released the string was pleasantly nice! One minor thing only: she pulled the string over her nose, so she is risking to scrape her nose with the string while shooting. Other than that it made me really curious about other archery scenes in the movie – I look forward to watch it!

If you are interested in trying it out who does it feel to be Katniss Everdeen (at least the archery part) contact me and come to one of the regular sessions at Falcon Archery Malta or team up with your friends and book an event for yourselves a time the suits you the best. For more details on the options and prices, please check out the “Activities, prices” menu.

You can watch the trailer below: