Now that I have seen it, I understand the empty chair.

This is not a matter of wounded pride, of crossed vetoes, or of unresolved contractual disputes. It is simpler than that, and at the same time more definitive: Steve Harris was not at the premiere of Burning Ambition because that film is not Iron Maiden. It is a docufilm about Iron Maiden. And he, having stated that difference publicly on April 13th on SiriusXM with his characteristic blunt honesty, could not sit in the front row and applaud something that does not represent the Maiden spirit. The excuse of having to rehearse only goes so far: a rehearsal can be rescheduled, the world premiere of the film about your band happens, perhaps, only once in a musician’s lifetime.

Now I know he was right.

The documentary starts badly, and when a documentary starts badly about a band you have known for forty-odd years, the bruise is different from the one any ordinary film might inflict. The first historical claim the documentary puts forward is that Paul Di’Anno was Iron Maiden’s first singer. A simple thing, verifiable, written in every rock encyclopaedia and every Wikipedia page in every language. Paul Di’Anno was the third singer. Before him there had been Paul Mario Day and Dennis Wilcock. This is not a technical detail for insiders: it is the story of the band, its chapter zero. Getting it wrong, in a documentary distributed by Universal Pictures and presented with a red carpet in London’s West End, is not a slip. It is the litmus test for everything that follows. Because what follows is a film that does not know its own foundations.

There is nothing about the Soundhouse Tapes, the self-produced recordings that Neal Kay began broadcasting at the Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse in London, creating the band’s first core of fans at a time when no radio station wanted anything to do with them. There is nothing about the Green Goddess, in which the band toured England playing pubs that emptied halfway through the set. There is no Cart and Horses in Stratford, where Iron Maiden began, the very place the band themselves still celebrate from their concert stages, as though the debt could never be repaid. There is no Ruskin Arms, another venue that for Maiden was not just a stop on the circuit but a founding place, another room where something irreversible had taken shape. None of that hunger, material and artistic, which is the only thing that makes what Iron Maiden became truly comprehensible. Loopy Newhouse tells it in detail in his book. Even the 2004 official documentary The Early Days, with all its limitations, did not shy away from that founding season. Burning Ambitiondoes, betraying its own title: the fire of ambition and the determination to make it at any cost, Harris’s own stubbornness in forging the sound that was perfect for him (and then for the whole world), has been cheerfully ignored.

And Neal Kay? The metal deejay was interviewed by the production team. He was there, available, with fifty years of memory and love for that band to share. He does not appear in the film. Someone decided his testimony was not needed. Someone who, evidently, had not understood that without Neal Kay the story of Iron Maiden does not exist, or at least exists in a radically different form. Leaving him out is not an editing choice: it is a failure of comprehension. The same fate befalls Dennis Stratton, the guitarist who recorded the first album and who occupies a small but not irrelevant place in the band’s history: he is part of that original photograph, that embryonic lineup the film claims to want to document. He does not appear. Not a word, not an image. As though his presence in those foundational years were a footnote too awkward to handle, or simply too obscure to bother searching for.  And more, Derek Riggs: if you celebrate Eddie so much, you need to give the deserved space ti its illustrator.

Then come the omissions that sting more, because they concern not the origins but the central body of a career. Somewhere in Time and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son do not exist in this film. Two albums that divided and captivated generations of fans, that brought synthesisers into the metallic armour of Iron Maiden at a moment when that choice was anything but obvious, that produced some of the most complex and debated pieces in the band’s catalogue, simply find no room. They are skipped entirely, as though that experimental period were an embarrassing parenthesis rather than one of the moments when the band genuinely risked something to remain faithful to a vision. Whoever decided to cut them did not understand, or did not want to understand, that Iron Maiden are not a band that has always done the same thing well. They are a band that has done different things, some of them divisive, and that is precisely why they have endured.

The Blaze Bayley era deserves a separate discussion, because there the film makes a stylistic mistake that goes beyond a historical gap, and it is a mistake in poor taste. Showing the video in which someone from the audience spits on Bayley during a concert in Chile, is not documenting a difficult phase. It is humiliating a man who navigated that phase with a dignity the film itself was unable to fully acknowledge. Iron Maiden are a band that has always protected its own, including those who are no longer part of the family. Choosing that image, in a film that is supposed to celebrate the band’s history, is not documentary courage: it is narrative laziness. The easy conflict, the striking image, the emotional shortcut. And meanwhile, the film forgets to explain what those years actually meant for the band, what it cost to keep that machine running when the wider public had turned away.

Clive Burr’s departure is not addressed. The drummer who played on Iron Maiden, Killers, and The Number of the Beast, who helped define the band’s sound in its most ferocious years, whose exit opened one of the unresolved questions of the group’s internal history, is barely acknowledged in this film. Nothing is said about his leaving, and little or nothing about him. As though the story of a band could be told without accounting for those who left, or were let go.

And yet the film has its moments. It is important to say so, because the dishonesty of a critique that acknowledges nothing would mirror the dishonesty of a film that refuses to address anything uncomfortable.

Blaze Bayley, in one of his sequences, says something simple and true: the world needs Iron Maiden. He says it with the conviction of someone who genuinely believes it, without rhetoric, without the tone of a press release. And it is one of those moments in which the documentary stops being a collection of images and becomes something more alive. Then there are the images of Nicko McBrain stepping away, the genuine emotion of watching a man who gave everything finally stop. In those moments the film touches something real, something no script could have constructed, because it is time itself speaking, not the direction.

But these are islands in an ocean of missed opportunities.

The fans, the real ones, the ones the film deploys as a Greek chorus to the Maiden epic, could have saved something, and perhaps they tried. The problem is not what they said in front of the camera: it is what the editing chose to keep. Because the stories that Iron Maiden fans carry are ones no one else could tell: the moment when the music crossed a life, changed a trajectory, served as the soundtrack to a loss or a falling in love. This is where I cried. This is where I met my wife. This is where I understood I wanted to live differently. If those stories ended up on the cutting room floor, that is where the responsibility belongs. What we see on screen instead are megaphones for a celebration that is unnecessary, because the band’s greatness is already established. Whoever watches a documentary about Iron Maiden already knows Iron Maiden are great. What they do not know, what they came to find out, is what it means to love them.

The Eddie animations complete the picture. Technically dated, stylistically alien to anything the contemporary audiovisual language has developed in the past ten years (one need only look at what independent creators have done on YouTube, or at certain AI-generated videos built around the band’s concerts), these sequences add nothing to the narrative. They fill the screen in moments when the film does not know what to say, and they do so with an aesthetic that Eddie himself, in his most recent graphic incarnation, would probably have found stale. From Universal Pictures, with the resources of a major label and the weight of an international distribution deal, one expected something different. One expected at least the ambition of the title.

The point, however, is what Harris had already said and what the film confirms frame by frame: Burning Ambition was not made by true Maiden people. It was made by music documentary professionals who studied the subject with the diligence of someone preparing for an exam, not with the passion of someone who knows that music from the inside. The difference is audible. It is audible in the sequence of errors. It is audible in what is missing. It is audible in the way the fans are used as decoration rather than as living material. It is audible, above all, in the choice never to interview the band members on camera, relegating them to voiceover while Lars Ulrich, Tom Morello, Gene Simmons, and Javier Bardem take the floor, with Bardem reciting the lyrics of Run to the Hills as though they were Neruda.

Javier Bardem is a remarkable actor and a genuine fan, and his fervour is real. But a documentary that favours famous fans over ordinary ones, those who made sacrifices and devoted their heart and soul to the band, has already said everything about itself. Harris, a lover of authenticity, understood this before he walked through the door. Which is why he did not.

The question that remains, the one this film will never answer, is the same one I left open in the previous article: what would he have made? What is contained in that “we would have done things slightly differently” that he chose not to unpack? Perhaps one day we will find out. Perhaps Harris will decide the moment has come, that fifty years of history deserve a telling made by someone who lived that history from the inside, not by someone who studied it with respect but without roots. Until then, Burning Ambition will remain what it is: an honest film about a legendary band, made by competent people who were not the right people.

And that empty chair on the London red carpet is no longer simply a gesture of integrity. It is a review.