Moon Knight is the latest series from Marvel on Disney+. It is only six episodes, which may be down to COVID issues, and the final one was released today.
I will try to avoid spoilers whilst giving my opinions. I have said before that I am not an avid comic reader, so I had not even heard of Moon Knight before this show was announced. I have recently bought a comic ebook to get some background and will read that soon (there is a reading backlog to work through).
The story starts in London (also featured in Eternals) where timid Steven Grant works in a museum that looks a lot like the British Museum, but they mess with where it is. He obviously has some issues as he takes precautions to stop himself wandering off at night. He has a big apartment for someone living in London without a high paying job. That is one of many unanswered questions. Oscar Knight does a great job in a role that involves multiple personalities, although his British accent is a bit Dick Van Dyke. We are also introduced to Ethan Hawke as Arthur Harrow who seems to have bad intentions as well as some mystical powers. The actual Moon Knight does appear in the first episode, but has relatively few scenes through the series. Perhaps that was due to COVID. I have seen the effects criticised, but I thought they were pretty good.
The story plays a lot on Egyptian mythology with humans acting as avatars of various gods. Steven is unaware of all this as it is actually his other personality Marc, a mercenary, who is the avatar. There is lots of action, but it is also a pretty powerful portrayal of mental illness with Steven trying to make sense of his life when he is missing chunks of it. Later on we get to see where this could have originated. I know some people think comics are for kids, but this is heavy stuff.
The action moves eventually to Egypt as you know there has to be a big confrontation there at some point. They do save the major action for the end.
The ending is a bit ambiguous with lots of threads not tied up, but then there is an extra scene in the credits that deals with some of them.
I did enjoy this show. The whole design of it is great with cool lighting and use of music. The ways it handled the multiple personalities was very clever. It was a fairly small core cast, but they did a great job of making us care about them.
I have watched a couple of videos about all the little details, but I only have so much time. I see there are already loads explaining the ending, but I just watched this one.
There are more shows coming soon from Marvel, but I am getting behind on movies. I have not yet seen the latest Spider Man and there is new Doctor Strange out. I have also not see The Batman or Dune, which I would like to see. I have not been to the cinema much recently. As I said above, I also have a backlog of reading that includes a few comics.
