Moon Knight (Disney+): A TV Review
/My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A completely forgettable and unforgivable mess of a Marvel series.
Marvel has not exactly covered itself in glory in the wake of the staggering achievement that was the narrative arc which culminated with Infinity War/Endgame.
Black Widow and Shang Chi were rather generic Disney/Marvel movie ventures and Eternals was the worst film Marvel has churned out in its history.
The Spider-Man Sony/Marvel movies have fared a bit better at the box office, but even those have been pretty lackluster films, Spider-Man: No Way Home being the exception. The other Sony/Marvel movies, Venom and Morbious, have been pretty disastrous.
In this post-Endgame era, Mickey Mouse’s minions have tried to branch out from feature films to television, giving us a plethora of Disney + content that has been more miss than hit.
WandaVision and Loki were flawed but at least ambitious. Hawkeye was a more conventional work, but entertaining nonetheless. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a middling misfire. What If…? an animated shitshow. And now there’s Moon Knight, which is easily the worst of the bunch.
Moon Knight is, like the lead character in the recent sorry Sony/Marvel movie Morbius, a bit of an obscure superhero in the Marvel canon.
Moon Knight is one of the superhero personas of Marc Spector/Steven Grant - a guy with a split personality. Spector is a rough and tumble American mercenary and Grant is an effete Brit who works at an Egyptian museum. Moon Knight is the avatar for the moon god Khonshu when Spector’s personality is in charge, and when Grant is in charge that avatar is Mr. Knight.
If that all sounds a bit much that’s because it is, and Moon Knight doesn’t do much to quell the confusion.
Moon Knight is, like Morbius, a pretty fascinating character once you do the comic book reading necessary, but also like Morbius, the character is poorly served by the studio’s attempt to take him mainstream because the vehicle used is so atrocious.
The series Moon Knight, like the film Morbius, is an utter abomination it is so awful.
The series runs for 6 episodes, and yet it’s pacing is so bad, its storytelling so stilted, its action sequences so dull, it felt like watching a 40 hour death march.
The series takes its sweet time actually introducing Moon Knight, a fatal error as he’s the only remotely interesting thing in it. Instead, it plays coy with Steven Grant’s perspective, and actually cuts away anytime something interesting is about to happen and Moon Knight is supposed to show up.
When Moon Knight finally does arrive on screen, he is accompanied by the most egregiously choreographed, poorly shot and dismally edited action sequences you’ll ever witness.
And it isn’t just the action sequences, as everything about Moon Knight looks and feels cheap.
A huge problem with the show is that Oscar Isaac simply can’t carry a series on his own, as he lacks the requisite charisma and star power, nevermind the acting ability.
Isaac’s appeal has long eluded me. He is routinely terrible in movies (try watching him in those Star Wars pieces of shit) and yet people fawn all over him like he’s some great actor/movie star.
That said, last year I saw him in the Paul Schrader film, The Card Counter, and I thought he was fantastic. His performance was underplayed, subtle and riddled with complexity. Finally, I began to see what other’s saw in Oscar Isaac…and then… he turns around and churns out the embarrassment that is Moon Knight.
All of Isaac’s versions of Moon Knight, be it Mark Specter or Steven Grant, are dead-eyed, dreadful and dull. By the way, Isaac’s British accent as Steven Grant is Dick Van Dyke level of hackneyed.
Speaking of dreadful, Morbious was a truly dreadful movie and, ironically, the geniuses behind Morbious and Moon Knight are on the same creative page as there’s a sequence in Morbious that is copied in Moon Knight.
In the sequence, there’s a sort of horror chase through a hallway with corporate zone lighting in it where the only lights that go on are the ones immediately above the person walking. It was enormously amusing to me that Moon Knight used the same exact lighting technique in an equally flaccid horror chase scene. Apparently unoriginal minds think alike.
Another major issue with Moon Knight is that the whole Egyptian gods thing is a tough sell, as once you start getting into supernatural instead of superhero, things become even more silly than usual pretty fast. Eternals suffered from a similar failing.
And Moon Knight doesn’t seem to be connected in any way to the rest of the Marvel Universe, so the series feels even more irrelevant. For example, why when giant Egyptian gods are fighting and civilians dying, wouldn’t the Avengers get involved?
To me, the most remarkable thing about Moon Knight is how instantly forgettable it is, and how atrociously made it is.
But rest assured, despite Moon Knight being a major mess, Marvel still managed to get its weak-kneed woke agenda into the series. There’s one sequence where a little Egyptian girl says to Scarlet Scarab (a female Moon Knight-esque character - it’s a long story), “are you an Egyptian superhero?”, and she replies with pride, “Yes I am!” That sequence made me cringe so hard I nearly defecated.
But rest assured, all that virtue signaling garbage is just icing on the cake of awfulness that is Moon Knight.
The bottom line is that if Moon Knight is what the future holds for Marvel, then the future is bleak indeed.
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