XPost: alt.disney, alt.politics.republicans, alt.business
XPost: sac.politics, alt.politics.media

https://redstate.com/bradslager/2025/07/06/disney-delivers-another- debacle-as-ironheart-becomes-marvels-the-acolyte-a-series-review-n2191308

Disney+ has released another Marvel series - “Ironheart” - and it becomes
not just another woke fiasco on the platform; this might be among the
worst offerings seen from the studio. Not only is this worse in quality
and amateurism than “She-Hulk,” it actually challenges “The Acolyte” as
far as being about the most unwatchable content from the streamer. (We
covered that monumental disaster extensively in 2024.)

So, just how bad is this new offering? The troubles are on display before
you watch one scene. Behold the red flags in the show's genesis: It was
written in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement; the cast is nearly
all POC, so they altered most of the source materia; filming was completed
in 2022 and is only now coming to light; the completed product went
through double-digit amounts of edits; the studio only put out a trailer
barely a month before the debut; and they burped out the entire series in
about a week with two, 3-episode releases.

All of this indicates how Disney-Marvel realized it had a debacle on its
hands and strained to deal with what they inspired. “Ironheart” stands as
the last offering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase-5, and it has
been a series of failures. “Deadpool and Wolverine” stands as about the
lone success from this iteration of the MCU. As a sign of how bad things
have been, the most successful of the Disney Plus-Marvel shows was “Agatha
All Along.”

Marvel master Kevin Feige was allegedly recently heard describing some of
the output seen from the streaming products in a painstaking light:

The head of Marvel Studios told colleagues recently that watching all the comic-book giant’s new TV shows and films had started to feel more like homework than entertainment.

This describes “Ironheart,” to be sure. Even as Disney head Bob Iger has declared they will be focusing more on quality of content rather than
quantity, this thing gestated back when the studio was marinating in
virtue activism; so, we get possibly the most woke-DEI-checkbox casting
ever seen, all done in a bid to hire a cast and crew based on their labels
as opposed to their talent and servicing the storyline. And it comes in
with a cost of roughly $20 million per episode?! (Obligatory spoilers
warning, although doubtful this is needed.)

The plot overview: This centers on a young and brilliant college woman who crafts her own Ironman-style super suit and ends up falling into
allegiance with a criminal outfit as she wrestles with her own morality
and identity. The reality: This is a villain origin story with a character
who is both unlikeable and self-destructive, and makes repeatedly horrible choices supposedly done in service to woke empowerment.

Thus begins a backstory of a brilliant child prodigy, Riri Williams, who manages to land a full scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. While there she uses grants made to MIT to create her version
of the Tony Stark weaponized suit, but she dumps on his accomplishment as something he was only able to do because he was a billionaire. This
completely ignores the basis of that storyline, where he built his initial
suit while held captive by terrorists in the Middle East. The show relies
on the insistence (rather than displaying) of Riri’s brilliance and motivations; she tells the audience, “I can be the greatest inventor of my generation.” Later she tells the dean, “I want to build something
undeniable. You want me to be small, but I refuse.”

Riri gets busted selling intelligence to other students and nearby
colleges - dismissing the concept of getting a top-flight career with corporations - and upon her expulsion, she makes off with the suit,
justifying that it was made with “her” grant money, not those made to the college. She manages to do this using the help of the built-in AI that is
a ripoff of Microsoft’s Clippy -- this example instead being an animated anthropomorphic pencil. (Yes…seriously.)

She meets with a friend to mourn the loss of her father and best friend, Natalie, to a gang shooting. She tells him, “I need a job that pays. A lab
so big they don’t notice if I finesse a resource here or there.” But
instead of working at a place like Boston Dynamics, where she could become rather unrealistically wealthy, she falls in with a gang to make far less
with her cut of the thieving and extortion. Riri needs a new AI for her
new version of her suit, after crashing.

So, she hacks into the “Black Panther” Wakanda servers and, with her brain wired to her computer, she dozes off thinking of her friend; Natalie is reconfigured as Riri’s new AI assistant. She becomes N.A.T.A.L.I.E. which stands for Neuro-Autonomous Technical Assistant Laboratory Intelligence
Entity. Yes…seriously.

The gang she connects with is led by Parker, known as The Hood, because he wears a hooded cape imbued with dark magic. His cohorts are a series of characters from the comics, but all are POC intersectional types, with a gender-fluid muscle duo and a hyper-flamboyant trans named Slug. Despite Parker-Hood being blatantly evil, it takes N.A.T.A.L.I.E. to explain to
the brilliant Riri that something is off about the guy. So, during one
heist Riri secretly removes a small patch of his cloak with a laser.

She also meets with the son of “Ironman” heavy Obediah Stane, and I had to laugh every time he was referred to as Zeke Stane. He is played by Alden Ehrenreich, who was the titular lead in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” in case
you were wondering why you are unfamiliar with him. In one moment, Riri
recoils at the remains ashes of "Zeke"s father Obediah, which he keeps in
a Zip-Loc baggie because, “We weren’t close.” Yes…seriously.

This is the halfway point and we have seen - after Riri agrees to join
this gang because they do not harm anyone - this group has murdered dozens
of corporation employees, security guards, and the CEO of one business
because he wanted to improve food supply techniques to feed the world, but impacted small farmers. So, we have a series justifying the actions of its
main character and then defying those very standards almost immediately.

After this point, many online thought Riri would have a redemption story
and become heroic, but it is not to pass. She is to become a villain, and
not a likable one, at all. When selling the audience an anti-hero, you
should give us a reason to either root for, or comprehend the motivations
of, or at the very least understand their descent into villainy. Instead,
we only get a self-centered character who justifies her acts because of
her racial station in life. Repeatedly, she asks others if she is a good person, and even Zeke Stane (heh) tells her flat out she is a selfish opportunist who steps on others, after he gets jailed for one heist when
she leaves clues behind.


From here, the show lurches from obtuse to interminable. Parker-Hood
realizes Riri had one member die at a heist, and he springs Zeke Stane
from jail and makes him quasi-bionic. Riri takes the patch from Parker-
Hood’s cape to a local hippie witch who can move to other dimensions, and
she learns the cape is from the dark realms. There is also some melodrama
when the former boyfriend of Natalie encounters AI N.A.T.A.L.I.E. and is understandably bothered, suggesting she be deleted. N.A.T.A.L.I.E. is
bothered, and the AI leaves in a dose of “you can’t fire me, I quit!” Yes…seriously.

The gang sets out to get Riri, and this is where things go obliviously hilarious. White Castle ponies up big dollars to have lengthy scenes shot
in a location, but who thought it was a good idea to have a group of POC
women seen breaking out in a fight inside of a restaurant, with all the
videos of this very thing seen on social media?! Anyway, Riri fends them
off, but then has to contend with the improved Zeke Stane. He gets the
better of her but instead of killing her, tells her to scoot from the
city; her suit is ruined. But since this is the “M-She-U,” we had to have
an obligatory fight with a woman hitting a guy in the grapes, because Girl Power.

Now, things turn just purely stupid. Riri needs to build a new suit for a
final battle and she manages to do so by going to her father’s former
garage. We are expected to believe that with no money, using only
mechanics tools and a 1971 Plymouth Barracuda, she manages to craft a suit
even better than the one she made at MIT with unlimited funding. She no
longer has AI to power the suit, so they rely on magic instead, using the swatch from Parker-Hood’s cape.

This time, she defeats Zeke because he allows her to, and this frees him
from control of Parker-Hood, somehow. Riri then defeats Parker by removing
his hood, and things culminate with her meeting with the ultimate villain, Mephisto. He strikes a deal with her where he brings Natalie back to life,
and as the girls embrace, we see Riri’s arm displaying evil veins. And we
are supposed to care, somehow.

This is such a mess that the unintentional laugh-lines are seen
throughout. A lead character wants money and power, but foregoes her
obvious lucrative career path for a life of petty crime. In order to hail
POC power, they need to culturally appropriate numerous comic characters.
We see Zeke become transformed by the trans character. Riri is shown
smarter than Tony Stark, but while hiding at a secret location, she orders delivery from Uber Eats. In a show supposedly proudly boasting POC pride,
they have their gang of the “Social-Justice League” fighting it out in an eatery like a Waffle House viral video.

Disney needs to be shamed for this mess as it is so obviously poor in
quality, it could not even manage “The Disney Woke Cycle” – Push woke content/Preemptively defend the criticism not taking place/ Tell those (not)criticizing they should not watch/Then call the failure due to the intolerance.

From the trailer release to the conclusion, this came out so rapidly that
there was no time for the usual spin cycle. The series wrapped up WHILE
the accusations were still taking place, and by then, the public saw this
show was what one school administrator told Riri at the start: “That’s a
hot pallet of garbage!”

The only redeeming aspect is that this wraps up this MCU segment, and
better times can be attempted. Maybe now Kevin Feige and Bob Iger will
look ahead, and maybe they can ret-con this entire Phase-5 fiasco, instead
of the way they have treated the audience. (Warning, video contains coarse gesture.)


--
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

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