Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition was a fun trip back into Maiden's history despite its Behind the Music-like melodrama and wallowing in hagiography.
The concert footage was a blast to watch on the big screen and hear on the cinema's sound system. I am not the world's foremost Iron Maiden expert but I thought I recognized all of the concert footage from the time Bruce Dickinson joined through 1988. The Number of the Beast through Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I was mildly disappointed that no live performances from this period were dragged from the vaults or found in someone's attic and dusted off.
My two main gripes are:
1) No song was ever played from beginning to end. At least I cannot recall one. This is a pet peeve of mine. I'm not asking for an entire performance of "Rime Of The Ancient Mariner" but how about something shorter like "Sanctuary" or "Aces High" or "Can I Play With Madness"?
2) The movie elided the bands adoption of keyboards in the mid-80s and their move into progressive metal wholeheartedly. I got aboard the Maiden train in 1988/89 with Seventh Son of a Seventh Son so I was disappointed that the doc basically ignored this album and its predecessor, Somewhere in Time. And this despite a scene where Dickinson tells a fan that heavy metal cannot be done with synthesizers. It was like the '86-'89 era was being setup for us and then nothing.
I feel badly for any fans who got into the band's music via any album after Brave New World because the movie had no interest in this music as it was irrelevant to the story's rise-fall-rebirth arc.
Honestly, the music generally played second fiddle to tales of band dynamics which is a shame.
On the plus side I felt the departure of Paul Di'Anno and the Blaze Bayley era were treated respectfully, if, perhaps, all too briefly. I wish that more was made of the music that Bayley made with the band. At least two songs from that era were kept in the live sets after Dickinson and Adrian Smith returned - "Sign Of the Cross" & "The Clansman" - so the band didn't write off that era as completely unworthy.
My preference is for documentaries that give pride of place to the music and the creative process that produces it and not the rise-fall-rebirth melodrama. Having said this, Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition was still a very fun watch and I learned more than a few things about the band, including the fact that Janick Gers is English. I thought he was from the Continent originally. Oops.
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