Dave’s Photo Blog

The Regent Theatre in Arlington punked the rest of New England today with the worldwide simulcast screening of Iron’s Maiden’s Flight 666. The movie is a documentary of their 2008 tour and recently won the best music documentary award at the recent SXSW festival and conference. The Regent was the only theater in New England to join the simulcast that had the movie playing in roughly 450 locations worldwide. And the Regent did it in style, with the soundtrack at concert volume levels.

Leland Stein is the booking manager at the Regent, and he’s doing a fantastic job of getting really good shows going at the Regent. This movie brought in an almost entirely new audience to the Regent and hopefully many of them will be back to take in some of the great shows in the Regent’s line-up. Leland gave the movie a brief introduction and then got out of the way so the heavy metal could roll. And man, did it roll.

I won’t give too much away – anyone interested in rock, heavy metal or arena concerts should absolutely go see this movie. The basic idea is that Iron Maiden decided to use a 757 to fly not only the band, but all the equipment and the crew to each venue on the first leg of their 2008 tour. By using the plane, they were able to perform 23 concerts in 45 days to sold out stadiums in 13 countries and logged 50,000 air miles in the process. And you might be interested to know that lead singer Bruce Dickinson flew the plane.

The concert footage is great and well woven into the overall story which follows the band through many of these performances. The band allowed pretty complete access to the film crew and so you get to see a lot of behind the scenes action, whether it be the band goofing off in the bus leaving the stadium after a show, or playing golf on a day off. But the concert footage is the centerpiece of a movie that shows a lot of very long sections of the performances of some of Iron Maiden’s most popular songs. At 112 minutes in running length, there’s also time to explore the reactions of the fans in many different countries and cultures and that’s where the film gets really interesting.

Although Iron Maiden won a Brit Award earlier this year, it is noted in the film that they are more popular abroad than they are in England. And it shows, particularly as they travel to Central and South America. In a show in Central America, a fan tells the film crew that one of his friends quit his job to travel to Costa Rica just to see Iron Maiden play because it was a, “once in a lifetime chance.” The fans in every country are rabid, dedicated Iron Maiden fans, but you can see how a single group united people across almost every continent in the reactions and behaviors of the fans in each city they play in. The person screaming at the end of the film’s trailer, for example, is in India – the first stop on the tour.

If you are a guitarist, there’s another reason to watch this movie – a very brief scene with Adrien Smith. He’s warming up for the concert backstage, playing guitar. But he’s not playing heavy metal or scales or anything. He’s playing the blues, Texas style, similar to Stevie Ray Vaughn. And he is fantastic at it. In what must be a mere 10 second clip, he just rips it up. And it’s in these small moments that you realize there’s a lot more to the characters in a band like this than one might think. Flight 666 is able to portray the depth of the band members and their reasons for touring. And that makes it a very interesting movie that also has headbanging music in it.