The MCU’s sprawling Phase Four marches on here in 2022 with the Disney+ series Moon Knight, headlined by Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke. Moon Knight, sometimes referred to as “Marvel’s Batman,” mostly due to some surface comparisons culled from the character’s earlier days, has always been an interesting, hard-to-pin-down outlier in the realm of superheroes. This first episode — which plays like a sly, slapstick mystery — is helped across the finish line by Isaac’s fun and rambunctious performance as a bumbling museum employee, Steven Grant, caught up in a dangerous duel between Egyptian gods. The premiere, like that of WandaVision (which didn’t start fully answering questions until its fourth episode), asks for patience as it offers very few specifics about poor Steven’s mental state, but Isaac’s “everyman” is such an endearing rom-com style fool that it all makes for an enticing introduction to a very unique crusader.Moon Knight Season 1 Download
In a recent Moon Knight featurette, series star May Calamawy described the series as a mix between Fight Club and Indiana Jones. That label tracks, though let’s also throw in The Long Kiss Goodnight, which starred Geena Davis as a government assassin who, after a trauma, finds herself mentally trapped inside a docile, suburbanite alias she created as a cover. There’s more of that going on here than Fight Club disassociation, but ultimately, after this first episode, we still need answers, particularly about the exact nature of Steven’s madness because he’s very much living half a life. Instead of seeking actual help for what he thinks are extreme sleepwalking episodes, he opts to strap himself to his bed at night, content with just losing large swaths of time and only partially existing within the real world. Even his job, as a lowly looked-down-upon gift shop employee, seems to allow him multiple unexplained days off as if everyone around him might be in on this particular ruse.