Moon Knight (2022)

 

Steven Grant is a mild-mannered, rather ineffectual gift-shop employee at the British Museum.  Grant suffers from what appears to be chronic sleep-walking, often waking up in places he has no idea how he got to.  This persists even after he takes to chaining himself to his bed at night.

Grant's problems extend far further than an uncommonly severe case of somnambulism, however.  In fact, he has dissociative identity disorder.  Which would be serious enough all by itself, but it turns out that his other identity, Mark Spector, is the avatar for the Egyptian moon god Khonshu, who is engaged in a centuries-long battle to prevent the return of the malevolent goddess Ammit.

Grant becomes aware of his alter-ego (and his alter-ego's alter-ego), just as the struggle against Ammit enters its most critical (and lethal) stage.  With the aid of Spector's wife Layla, the two men will need to find a way to co-exist long enough to save humanity from Ammit's devastating plans.

There's quite a lot to like about Moon Knight.  For instance, Oscar Isaac is excellent in the main roles of Grant and Spector.  He convincingly portrays both identities as genuinely different people, including changes in accent, demeanour, body language and mannerisms.

Khonshu is also an interesting figure.  The moon god is a not especially friendly mentor figure to Spector; and at times, nearly an outright adversary to Grant.  He works to a different set of ethics and priorities than those generally held by modern western people, and this creates an interesting conflict within the show.

I also very much enjoyed May Calamawy as Layla.  The character is a good one and her performance is strong.

Despite all these positives, however, I felt the show was less than the sum of its parts.  I largely blame this on the writing, which I felt has a couple of weaknesses.

The first is the villains.  Ammit is quite a memorable foe, but her human minions are rather less interesting.

The second is pacing.  The show has a lot of backstory and information to unload, and things sometimes bogs down as it does so.  I didn't find myself ever truly swept up into the first couple of episodes, and when things finally seemed to get rolling, the show then took a very sharp left turn. As a comic book character, Moon Knight has had a lot of different depictions and styles and story arcs, and for my money the show tries to include too many disparate elements in its brief run of only six episodes.