Reviewing: Moon Knight (***)
Oscar Isaac playing two different characters at war with each other is great. It’s just a little too out there for me.
One of the things that really intrigued me about the first episode was how our protagonist Steven would phase out and into consciousness to find that the scene has taken a dramatic turn in his absence. It left you scrambling to try and fill in the blanks to try to understand what was going on. That was really fun because it pulled you in to Steven’s world, forcing you to view things from his perspective as opposed to being able to see all sides of the story as an omnipresent viewer. On the other hand, one of the shortcomings of the first four episodes was that I had so little an idea of what was really going on. Who is Steven, and who is Marc? Who is Konshu? Who is Arthur Harrow? By episode five, we had relatively solid answers to all of these questions. But not being confident in who your protagonist was really held my wife and I back in terms of our ability to enjoy the series. It’s one thing not knowing if your character is a good guy or a bad guy – that can be fun. But not knowing if they’re real at all in the midst of an already complex plot was a bit too much for us. Maybe I’d enjoy it more on a rewatch. Then again, some questions were left permanently unanswered – like what was the deal with Harrow’s foot-bleeding ritual? It was the scene that started the whole show, and yet we only got a minor nod to it on the very last episode that ultimately showed it hadn’t played a role at all. What was the significance of that scene?
Episode five was definitely my favourite of the season, mainly because we got a clear understanding of who Steven and Marc were. It was cool to see the two of them in physical form, side-by-side and working together. And it was even cooler learning how Marc was the original personality and that Steven was a coping mechanism. It’s reminiscent of Bing Bong from Pixar’s Inside Out, in the sense that Bing Bong was an imaginary character who helped Riley for a time before being ‘forgotten’ for her own good. And when episode five ended, I really loved how it ended by killing Steven. It was heart-wrenching, dramatic, and it set Marc up for a moment of self-actualization.
But then episode six came around and Steven came back to life for some reason. Here’s what I don’t get. How can he really come back to life at all if he isn’t really real to begin with? Is the idea that Marc and Steven are two completely separate souls within one body, as opposed to two personifications of what is ultimately the same person? That’s not the way we normally understand dissociative identity disorder, which is what Marc is apparently supposed to have. I think I would’ve found it more compelling for Marc to now have to face things without Steven to help; for Marc to take the best of Steven into himself and be a full man for the first time. At the same time, I get why they did what they did. Moon Knight isn’t quite the same when he’s just one guy. His whole gimmick is jumping back and forth between these personalities. I just can’t help but think of Steven as little more than an imaginary friend, in which case Marc’s decision to be willing to die for him seems irrational. And more than that, what is Layla, Marc’s ex-wife, supposed to do? Can she be in love with two men in the same body? Can she love one but not the other? That seems like a very messy romantic entanglement.
I enjoyed the Egyptian mythology that played a hefty role in this series, particularly when it came to the depiction of the gods Ammitt and Taweret. The nod to the Black Panther afterlife was a nice piece of connective tissue too, helping clear up the idea of multiple possible afterlives. But much like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, I found myself wondering if the MCU was delving too deeply into spiritual matters. Like sixteen different people get possessed in this show, and there’s always something mildly unsettling about it. In much the same way that Strange did in his sequel, Moon Knight went from the kind of magic nobody believes in (like the Egyptian gods being real) to a spirituality that a lot of people do to some extent (like possession by spiritual beings). There’s something less fun about that for me. I’m forced to step back from the story a bit to be more discerning, and I didn’t love that. Not everyone will be bothered by this stuff, and that’s fine. But it’s also not surprising that not everybody will be okay with this, either.
All in all, Moon Knight ranks towards the lower half of Disney+ MCU content in my book. It’s not necessarily bad – Oscar Isaac’s great bouncing performance of two characters being proof of that – but it’s not really the kind of story that hooked me in from the beginning. Instead, I was met with more head-scratching moments than edge-of-my-seat moments.