Moon Knight Review: A Funny, Odd, and Surprisingly Detached Marvel Series

The funny, odd, and touching first episode of the Marvel Studios original series Moon Knight homes in on its central character’s eccentricity. An aspiring museum tour guide doomed to unbox tchotchkes in the gift shop, the lonely and endearingly awkward Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) dotes on his one-finned goldfish, flubs a first date, and straps himself to a post by his bed at night to prevent himself from sleepwalking.

Moon Knight, though, quickly abandons its intimate scope as it raises the narrative stakes. One day, Steven starts to hear voices in his head, and when he tracks the source to a mirror in his London flat, he’s greeted by a reflection that moves on its own. Turns out that what he thought were bouts of somnambulism have in fact been periods of dissociation.

Steven proceeds, over the course of Moon Knight, to wrestle for control of his body with Marc Spector, who takes over when Steven blacks out—and who we soon learn is in fact the modern-day avatar of the Egyptian god Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham). Marc, a mercenary by training, communes with Khonshu and does his bidding, which purportedly consists of protecting the downtrodden. It’s a fitting alter ego for Steven, who’s obsessed with ancient Egypt, albeit far too cowardly to be a superhero.

Marc reluctantly loops Steven in on Khonshu’s latest directive: to smite Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke), the prophet of a cult attempting to resurrect a goddess whose return would, for murky reasons, spell catastrophe. And so the duo travels to Egypt to engage in amateur archaeology in pursuit of Harrow, resulting in an adventure that suggests an MCU spin on The Mummy.

Steven and Marc usually but not always confer through reflective surfaces. These exchanges at times achieve a fun sense of believable spontaneity, as when Steven, surrounded by armed henchmen, panics and begs Marc to take over his body. At others, the physical environment elucidates the psyches of the two personalities, like when their eye contact through the blade of a knife captures Steven’s dumbfounded fear in the face of violence.

Throughout the series, Steven’s and Marc’s dialogue encapsulates the divide between the allure of the two characters: Where the former is as unpredictable as the bonkers British accent that Isaac has concocted for him, the latter speaks in a flairless American one. But their interactions grow tiresome due to Marc’s overwhelming blandness, as he’s confined to the familiar mold of the tough, emotionally withholding alpha.

If, as Steven, Isaac exudes charm, Hawke’s performance demonstrates the distinction between charm and charisma. The enigmatic Harrow radiates the kind of gravity that keeps cults glued together; he speaks in confident absolutes about good and evil, intensely but softly, tempering the weight of his philosophizing with the warmth of his tone. He’s also prone to self-flagellation: The first episode opens by depicting a ritual that ends with Harrow filling his sandals with broken glass. But while his practices are intriguingly depicted, their motivations and implications are left unexamined. Despite the centrality of a mental break to its proceedings, Moon Knight largely pretends at psychological depth.

Steven and Marc, meanwhile, take every opportunity to blame their frustrations and misfortunes on each other. Rare are the moments in which either persona looks inward, or when the series interrogates, beyond a surface level, the dynamics of their cohabitation in a single skull. We’re told, instead, about the men’s natures by characters like Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy), an old acquaintance of Marc’s who joins the team, and is saddled with a rote traumatic backstory and a responsibility to reveal Marc’s past sins. As such, Moon Knight quickly loses sight of the personal, concerning itself with the fate of the world rather than the lives of its denizens—becoming less interesting, less human, as the conflict escalates.