It’s been a long wait for Ironheart‘s small-screen debut; after first appearing in 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams hasn’t made a single MCU appearance. Even Ironheart, which was filmed in 2022 (with some 2024 reshoots and added photography), hasn’t been heard from, outside of the occasional trailer or bit of teaser footage. Some of this can be naturally attributed to the shifting priorities of the MCU over the past 24 months – but the first three episodes of Ironheart, which finally premiered this week on Disney+, feel like they’re struggling with a larger question of her place the unwieldy, sprawling universe.
In turn, it makes the first half of her flagship miniseries feel torn between a handful of identities and ideas – and despite holding a few interesting nuggets of ideas about legacy and purpose, gets too mucked down by trope-laden storytelling (including some awful dialogue) and underdeveloped secondary characters to end its first half with the emotional impact it clearly wants to hold.
In the time since her adventure in Wakanda, things have been rough for Riri Williams – when Ironheart begins, she’s mourning the death of her friend and stepfather all while getting expelled from MIT, after getting caught hustling homework to pay for desired upgrades to her iron suit. After taking the buggy, malfunctioning mech suit back to her home of Chicago, she immediately finds herself entangled in some local, appropriately D-level conflicts back home, primarily in the form of a ragtag gang of thieves working for a man who goes by both Parker and The Hood (Anthony Ramos), trying to continue funding the development of her suit.
From there, “Take Me Home”, the series premiere, walks the audience slowly through a series of poorly-written expositions. These come from various characters in Riri’s life; her dead best friend’s brother Xavier (Matthew Elam), her mother Ronnie (Anji White), and anyone else who happens to pass across director Sam Bailey’s frame; there’s a shitload of explaining in the first hour, thinly disguised exposition tirelessly establishing the thin character arcs driving the protagonist of the series, someone who declares she “can be the best inventor of her generation”, before accidentally creating an AI of her dead best friend from her own brain waves.
Meanwhile, a man named Parker is gathering local Gen Z stereotypes to start a criminal gang; Riri, in her attempts to fund the ongoing development of her suit, joins up with them to commit petty crimes in the name of making money. Except its very obvious, from both Hood’s vague explanations and thin plans for their heists, and the black veins spreading across his body like an infection, that there’s something else going on here; but Riri blindly signs up in the name of making money.
From there, Ironheart bounces back and forth through Riri’s timeline, occasionally offering flashbacks of the times she spent with her friend Natalie before her death – while also contending with her sudden reappearance as a conversational, neurotic AI, which offers up waaay too many opportunities for the series to indulge in some cringe-y “hip” dialogue as they pursue the hidden truths behind Parker and his supposed mission to steal from the rich to give to the poor.
As a concept, it feels as aimless and low-scale as it sounds; each episode gets its one obligatory sequence featuring the suit, with the rest of each revolving around exposition heavy conversations (often alluding to things we haven’t seen, or haven’t had explained to us yet) and sequences of Ironheart trying to be vaguely cheeky with its character interactions. All of it feels incredibly perfunctory, especially when the series tries to take bigger swings with the resolutions of its first three hours, hinting at larger baddies lying in wait (a series of Faust posters behind Riri in the second episode heavily suggesting Mephisto, who has been rumored to appear in the MCU since WandaVision) – or even more troublesome, when it tries to become a series about legacy, or the melding of science and magic in the MCU.
The latter of these is to be expected; there’s no world in which the MCU adapts magical “technology” without it resulting in a whole lot of gobbledygook, techno-jargon mashed up with the always-explanation heavy use of magic and its ephemeral presence in a universe. When Ironheart hints at these tensions, it immediately becomes a less interesting series, Riri’s indifference to it all only further underlining how little these mechanics matter to a universe that’s faltering at simply telling compelling, driven, emotionally logical stories about its heroes, antiheroes, and cosmic ne’er do wellers; there’s just too much shit going on and too many people talking about it at any given moment, reducing Hood and his team (including another interpretation genderfluid super hacker trope, which I’ll remind everyone was perfected with Banshee‘s Job) to a few predictable notes, begging the question of why they fill up so much time of each Ironheart episode.
There are moments in each episode, however, that suggest a slightly quieter, less forced approach to Riri’s internal journey; those are best, and often only defined, when she interacts with a local black arms dealer, who just so happens to be Obediah Stane’s son, Ezekiel (Alden Ehrenreich). Their scenes, particularly in the second and third episodes, are the only moments where Ironheart sheds its perfunctory storytelling and MCU trappings to explore stories about actual characters, two people at crossroads with their identities and legacies of their family, and how their paths crossing affects their path forward in life. For those brief moments, Ironheart feels like it is building towards something, towards presenting Riri and Zeke as something other than pastiches of concepts and ideas from the other, better MCU films it is clearly using as its underlying foundation.
However, the large majority of Ironheart‘s first three hours mostly just feel pointless; the threads of where its story is heading are rather obvious from the first hour, leaving episodes two and three feeling like thumb-twiddling as it sets up a number of very obvious arcs for the second half of the season to follow Sure, there are some bits of excitement in the rare moments Ironheart offers up some action – but some woeful editing and lack of personality in its delivery (particularly in the MCU-house visual style) leaves its kinetic moments feeling as muted and disengaged as the storytelling everywhere else. It renders much of the long-awaited miniseries feeling either more like an afterthought than a worthy origin story – or worse, a meaningless exercise in imitation, left isolated and adrift in a random pocket of a convoluted, oversaturated franchise.
Grade: C-
Other thoughts/observations:
- Focusing the series on a character who builds an unwieldy AI they don’t fully understand feels prescient in a way Ironheart really, really wants to ignore.
- I understand Ironheart trying to adopt hip language for The Youths, but it is all cringe in its delivery (“off rip” in 2025? C’mon) and feels transparently desperate. Slug calling someone “zaddy” is another particular lowlight, or Riri telling someone “send the addy” (a phrase so awful she doesn’t use it the next time she asks someone to send her an address).
- At one point, Riri realizes Natalie is remembering Riri’s own memories of her. She is incredulous for about one second, then waves it off and continues with whatever plot bullshit is going on at that moment. It’s that kind of narrative flag-planting Marvel thinks is so clever, but has become so repetitive it is plainly obvious it is alluding to something that will happen later on.
- Gotta love some big gaps in logic that are hand-waved away: Riri is apparently a technological savant who performs scientific miracles on a regular basis, like when she brain-maps her dead friend into an AI overnight, a task Zeke notes would melt someone’s brain. She just simply does it, and we never mention it again!
- Ironheart is solar and wind powered?
- Riri, at one point, corrects someone to note that what she’s building is “iconic”… all we’ve seen her do this season is ask an AI to make her suit better, which makes the line feel flat and performative.
- Nobody wears their dead sister’s headphones… Ironheart clearly doesn’t know what to do with Xavier, except to make Riri feel sad and horny interchangeably.
- So Riri is making Ironheart to… “revolutionize safety”? And how is she doing that?
- Hey, there’s Eric Andre in one scene! …. aaaand then his character is murdered offscreen.
- Why does Parker think getting tattoos will cover up the black veins climbing down his back? This series goes out of its way to make him look like an idiot, but this is easily his dumbest trait.
- At the end of episode two, Riri’s mom asks her to remake her husband like she did Natalie. Riri is basically like “nah” and then it’s never mentioned again.
- “I gotta optimize the suit!” All those great montages in Iron Man and Spider-Man movies of tech being made, thrown away for a single line of someone telling an AI to do it for them. It’s not a very well-thought out concept creatively, if we’re being honest.
- Hopefully the second half of this miniseries can iron out these glaring issues with its pacing and character explorations. We’ll find out next week!
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