Iron Maiden: Flight 666
- Directed by Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn
- Starring: Iron Maiden
Wednesday is Earth Day, a celebration all things green and wholesome, but today is Maiden Day, a day to revel in all things proudly loud and metallic. The occasion is the launch of Canadian-made heavy-metal rock documentary Iron Maiden: Flight 666, which gets a one-day showing in more than 450 screens from Slovakia to Japan.
The film, which documents the first leg of the six-man band's 2008 Somewhere Back in Time tour, celebrates a hard-working British band that is famous for epic tours and a devoted international audience. The film, by Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen (creators of Metal: A Headbanger's Journey and Global Metal) will soon head to DVD as a well-shot and recorded HD concert film for fans whose demand for video albums, compilations and live records seems inexhaustible.
The rest of the film is a warts-free backstage chronicle of the band on tour, joking on the plane, interacting with its long-time admirers and playing old hits for new fans. The musicians come across as a group of likeable blokes in their 50s who run a global business, performing riff-heavy music (three guitarists!) with purple lyrics drawing from Gothic fantasy literature, history and religion. Deliberately out of step with media fads and musical fashion, Iron Maiden seems to exist, as the band's manager says, “on our own planet.”
That’s captain Bruce Dickinson to you: How many other metal-band front men do you know who pilot a 757?
Though they've sold 70 million albums and show no sign of stopping, the band members acknowledge their peak was more than 20 years ago, but the middle-age rock 'n' roll life suits them. Between gigs, the drummer likes nothing better than to tie his hair back in a ponytail and get out on the golf course. The businesslike singer Bruce Dickinson, who, unlike most heavy-metal musicians does not resemble either Cher or Conan the Barbarian, gives new meaning to the phrase “front man.” He doubles as the onstage lord of misrule and the offstage pilot of the Boeing 757 jet that serves as the band's intercontinental tour bus. This is well beyond a hobby: The film follows the tour for six weeks, from London to India, Australia, Japan, the United States, Central and South America and the Caribbean, finishing in Toronto.
As in their two previous metal documentaries, Dunn and McFadyen cast themselves as fans with cameras. In contrast to other band docs such as Metallica: Some Kind of Monster or the comic, inspirational Anvil! The Story of Anvil , currently in theatres, Flight 666 is metal without the personality clashes. This is a film for, by and often about Iron Maiden's true believers. Why does a grown-up Colombian man stand at the end of a concert weeping as though he has just witnessed a religious miracle? Flight 666 never really tries to explain the phenomenon, but if you have to ask, probably this isn't the film for you.
