So it seems that the upcoming Star Wars film The Rise Of Skywalker looks set to feature some #badarchery, with a character called Jannah, played by British actress Naomi Ackie, wielding a bow as part of the Resistance. This image came from a piece in Vanity Fair earlier this year.



Obviously her form is pretty horrible, but that’s par for the course. Perhaps it was just for the photo shoot. We’ll see what happens when the film comes out and if they’ve put any effort into making it look real. Not that it needs to be real. Just hopefully not actually stupid.



The bow is kind of interesting. At first glance it looks a little like a camless compound bow with a shoot-through riser, as found on a few target and hunting bows, e.g. this model from Bear:

But looking a little more closely it looks suspiciously like one left-hand and one right-hand recurve riser glued together. Risers are distinctive, and with thanks to everybody on my Facebook page who contributed, we even found out exactly what. It’s a pair of Initech 2 risers, sold by the Decathlon group – a chain of French sports stores found across Europe. They sell a variety of cheap own-label Chinese archery gear, and an Initech riser is yours for just €50.

So Jannah’s ‘energy bow’ really does appear to be just a couple of these epoxied together, with some ‘limbs’ stuck in the end (possibly broken off, reversed real recurve limbs?), some extras, and most likely an elastic string (if most other Hollywood archery is anything to go by). It’s even clearer if you look on this Star Wars ephemera website:

Still, I found myself enjoying the chutzpah and inventiveness of the props guys for sticking a cheap left hand and a cheap right hand together and coming out with something suitably steampunk and interesting looking – even if it saved them the bother of designing something from scratch. And maybe when the film comes out, it’ll all make some sense. Is Jannah going to be a heroine up there with Katniss? Who knows? But she’s going to hurt her elbow doing *that*, that’s for sure.