Oscar Isaac as Moon Knight in the Marvel series streaming on Disney+.
Oscar Isaac as Moon Knight in the Marvel series streaming on Disney+.
Opinion by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
Marvel's new series Moon Knight is like a band that had an album explode to the top of the charts and is now using their newfound creative control to get extremely weird with it.
Because Moon Knight, which is streaming on Disney+, is a very wild and weird show. Inall the best ways.
The best thing about it is that it's the first Marvel show that isn't jumping through hoops - or multiverses - to link itself to the all-encompassing, ever-growing Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are no winking nods to past events, no superpowered cameo appearances, or even any mention of superpowers, superheroes or supervillains anywhere within its first four episodes. There are a couple of rival Egyptian gods but we'll get to them shortly.
The Egyptian God Khonshu in the Marvel series Moon Knight.
While hardcore Marvel fans delight in the layered, interconnected, self-referential spiderwebs that link all of the MCU's movies and TV shows together, that same extreme connectivity can be off-putting for more casual viewers. It asks a lot of you just to keep up with things.
With Moon Knight, you don't have to worry about any of that malarky. While it will no doubt link up at some point, for now it's completely standalone. If you didn't know it was a Marvel show, you wouldn't know it was a Marvel show. Instead, you'd simply think you'd stumbled upon a strange, super fun, vaguely Indiana Jones inspired action-adventure. With, as mentioned, a few gods thrown in for good measure.
Oscar Isaac in the Marvel series Moon Knight.
Oscar Isaac stars as the masked titular hero and his alter ego, the mild-mannered, bumbling museum gift shop worker Steven Grant. The twist is that Isaac also stars as Grant's other alter-ego, the confident action-man Marc Spector.
This is because Grant/Spector has Dissociative Identity Disorder, a mental health condition that's characterised by the presence of two or more distinct personality states. Isaac is a superb actor and here he does a stellar job defining and separating his two characters.
Oscar Isaac as Moon Knight.
Grant is a good-hearted dweeb, hunched over and fidgety and reminiscent of Frank Spencer from ye olde Brit sitcom favourite Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. With no knowledge of his Spector persona he associates his blank memory spells and unexplainable bumps and bruises with a sleeping disorder. Worried about what he's doing when he's asleep he takes huge precautions each night, like chaining himself to his bed, so he can't sleepwalk off at night and securing his front door with multiple locks and chains.
What he doesn't know is that when he falls asleep Spector awakens to take control of their body. A former mercenary Spector is chasing an ancient Egyptian artefact, a golden scarab with magical powers. Unfortunately, so is Ethan Hawke's villain, a softly spoken cult leader who is in service to the crocodile faced Egyptian god Ammit.
The Egyptian God Khonshu in the Marvel series Moon Knight.
Because Spector is in service to the Egyptian god Khonshu, a towering bird-skulled humanoid, whenever he runs into trouble he can magically don the white superhero suit of Moon Knight, which acts as a sort of invincibility shield.
I realise this is all sounding a bit weird, but I did warn you about that at the start. The fun of the series begins when Grant starts to wake up at awfully inopportune times and in truly dire situations that a gift shop worker doesn't want to ever find themselves in; like woefully outnumbered in the middle of a violent fistfight or behind the wheel of a cupcake delivery truck that's being shot at in a high-speed chase down a perilous cliffside road.
Oscar Isaac as Moon Knight.
Whenever Grant or Spector swap personas the screen repeatedly glitches to black until the other self takes over. It's a powerful visual motif that ensures it's easy to follow along with who's in control at any point. But as Isaac's performance of the two characters is so well defined and recognisable you can always tell which personality he's portraying. Even when they're squabbling with each other through bathroom mirrors, shiny windows or any reflected surface.
While the personality swapping is occasionally played for laughs, mostly when Grant's thrust into action for some fish-out-of-water heroics, the mental illness itself is not. The toll the illness takes on Grant, physically, emotionally and mentally, is obvious and treated with respect.
Ethan Hawke as villain Arthur Harrow in Moon Knight.
Don't get me wrong, this is not a studied and brutally accurate representation of a mental illness like Anthony Hopkins' recent multi-Academy Award-winning movie The Father. It's still a fast-paced action-adventure series about a dude in a snazzy white costume battling the legions of an Egyptian god after all.
Because it's not carrying any Marvel baggage, Moon Knight is a series I'd confidently recommend to people who wouldn't usually watch anything superpowered. The snappily paced story is engaging and intriguing, the action sequences are slick, bone-crunching fun and its keen humour keeps the tone light, giving the whole thing the feel of a rollicking adventure movie.
After four episodes I'm not sure where it's going, but by gods I'm staying on Marvel's wild ride.
