My Burning Ambition thoughts (mild spoilers).
If you're a hardcore fan going into this expecting a deep dive on which guitar strings Adrian used in 1984, how Weekend Warrior was carefully crafted or if they really did perform Back in the Village live then you're going to be very disappointed. It's not that kind of movie.
Indeed, the albums and the songs themselves are barely even discussed and whenever we do get a song it's almost always a live version, something that I think would make Steve happy since he sees Maiden as a live band first and foremost. The track list itself is interesting. Who would have predicted we'd get The Book of Souls on here? And if I have a genuine complaint about any part of this film it's that we get nothing from Seventh Son.
It took a while for me to figure it out but this morning I finally realised that this isn't a film about the albums or the music or any of that stuff. It's about the people. The people in the band and the people who love the band (and the impact it's had on them).
There's a pivotal section about halfway through when the film focuses on Poland 84 and then segues into RiR 85. I did wonder at the time why they chose to hyper focus on those moments in particular when it became clear that these were two pivotal moments (on the same tour no less) that connected the band with audiences from two very troubled parts of the world (Eastern Europe and South America) who had never experienced anything like this before. As part of the narrative, it now made total sense.
Burning Ambition skips over a LOT of stuff and events and that's probably going to piss some fans off. Going back to the lack of any direct album discussion, there's no mention of Martin Birch for example. I was surprised how much time they gave to the Blaze era though as like a lot of people, I thought they might skip that over. The reunion era is given time but most of the focus is on Bruce's cancer scare and Nicko's stroke, rather than how many stadiums they sold out. There's also a few interesting time jumps, such as we see the creation of Ed Force One (and Bruce's piloting) AFTER the cancer story. Chronologically it's nonsense of course but from a storytelling perspective it works more.
That's what you have to go in remembering. This probably isn't going to laser focus on your favourite thing. It's trying to tell the rise, fall and rise again of an institution in under 2 hours from the perspective of the people who care the most on and off the stage. And for me it worked tremendously well. The 2 hours flew by and the film didn't out stay its welcome. We also get a smattering of unseen archival footage (which tells me that Maiden have a lot more in their vaults that they're letting on) and restored live clips. Here's hoping that the blu-ray comes with plenty of extras.
Oh and the Eddie animated scenes were wonderful. 4/5
A funny thing happened in my screening. About halfway through, three middle aged women walked in and sat down. They were waving their phones about (with the flashlight on) and talking loudly for several minutes. I asked them to be quiet and was ignored so I had to turn on my inner Eddie and told them to shut up. A minute went by and it finally dawned on the three yapping idiots that they weren't watching The Devil Wears Prada 2 and they left.
