Amid the usual welter of pre-emptive criticisms, hopes, dreams, doubts and hostilities that suffuse the internet whenever a new addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – or any other alternative world beloved of a fandom – is announced, Ironheart (the 14th TV series in the MCU and following on from the events in 2022’s film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) has at last arrived.
In the film, Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne, reprising the role on the small screen, which can barely contain her charisma or energy) was the genius MIT student who invented the vibranium detector that rather kicked off the whole vibranium power struggle, then the metal exoskeletal suit that aided the Wakandans in their face-off with Talokan. At the end, she returned to MIT and that is where we find her at the beginning of Ironheart, on a Tony Stark fellowship, and trying to wangle an extra year of grant money to refine the suit that could potentially transform emergency services provision. “Help would never be too late!”
Unfortunately, she has provided herself with interim funding by completing assignments for stupider students and is duly kicked out. She returns to her mother’s apartment in Chicago with nothing but a battered prototype flying suit to show for her efforts, plus recurring flashbacks to the night five years ago when she lost her beloved stepfather Gary and her best and only friend Natalie in a shootout at the former’s garage.
Creative capacity … Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams in Ironheart. Photograph: Marvel/PA
What’s a traumatised genius inventor to do? Well, first she scans her own brain to upgrade her suit’s AI and this results in, effectively, the murdered Natalie (Lyric Ross) coming back to life and being able to accompany bestie on her new swathe of adventures. These adventures come courtesy of a gang of misfits who have assembled above a pizza parlour nearby and are bent on sticking it to The Man via one telegenic heist and/or caper per episode, accruing money and power as they go – with all of their plans facilitated by having someone in an impregnable, weaponised suit accompanying them.
The group is led by the formerly petty and now much more ambitious criminal Parker “The Hood” Robbins (Anthony Ramos), owner of a mysterious cloak (with a hood, obvs) that enables him to become invisible – and who is also the sporter of a large tattoo that attempts to disguise a torso that is covered in scales. Is he the Big Bad or is he just the instrument of a Bigger Bad, possibly linked to the unearthly sumptuary powers hanging round him? I guess we will have to wait and see.
Riri signs up to help the gang with three jobs to earn money to pay for improvements to her suit. Shopping for bionic and/or black market parts brings her into contact with Joe McGillicuddy (Alden Ehrenreich), an over-nice guy who lets people walk all over him until Riri starts giving him bracing life advice. His bunkerful of illegal tech and weaponry makes him feel closer to his father, an engineer, and Joe intends to use it not for bellicose purposes but for the betterment of humanity. Older, more jaded people might buy this story from a man with a bunkerful of illegal tech and weaponry slightly less readily than Riri does, but she is young and perhaps by episode three or so she will learn.
Watch a trailer for Ironheart
We all, in fact, must work quite hard to stay up to speed. Ironheart is a fast and furious business. Like Ms Marvel, it is clearly aimed at the younger end of the fan spectrum and the pace is relentless, as if the makers are desperate not to give the audience a second to look away. In keeping with the YA vibe, there is much weight given to loyalty and friendship rather than romance or sex (though there is a spark between Riri and Natalie’s sweet brother Xavier, played by Matthew Elam); no swearing, and plenty of flashy effects and cartoonish violence involving a lot of people being thrown against a lot of walls.
There is also a very repetitive emphasis on The Choices We Make and how they Define the People We Become – how long you can hang out with criminals without becoming one, how often you can do the wrong thing for the right reasons without it corrupting you, at what point ignorance becomes wilful, and so on. To say it becomes preachy would be putting things too strongly. But “slightly tiresome” would not. At least until it’s time again to throw someone at a wall. And for that you rarely have to wait too long.
Ironheart is on Disney+