Yes I watched Moon Knight.
It was the only piece of MCU media that I have been able to actually sit through entirely since Endgame. And even Endgame was a struggle for me because I had mostly checked out of the MCU by then.
I see people constantly talking about how bad the writing is, but I don’t see it. Sure, there was one absolutely atrocious scene that I immediately lambasted, and if you’ve seen the show, you know the one.
Since I can’t take screenshots, this is the best I can do for you. When Khonshu stands before the Ennead and pleads his case against Arthur Harrow. The writing in this scene felt like your average Quoran writer wrote it. I mean, they just take Arthur at his word instead of actually doing any investigating at all? When one of their biggest enemies/threats is potentially going to be released, you’d think they might just double check to be sure. But no, they don’t like Khonshu, and so they immediately side with Arthur. The writing was abysmal here.
But elsewhere I couldn’t find problems with it where other people did.
I thought this was an excellent adaptation of the 2016 Moon Knight Run.
In this run, Marc starts out in an insane asylum and has to work with some other inmates to stop some crazy shit from going down. During the course of the run, the reader is constantly lead to believe that this could be real, but it might also be a figment of Marc’s fractured mind. We’re made to question everything he’s ever done. In the end, Marc, Steven, and Jake, all end up realizing that they’re part of the same system. They need each other, and if they work together, they’ll be far more powerful than if they continue to fight and bicker between each other.
Obviously as I said, the show was an adaptation of this. Instead of allowing Jake any spotlight at all, they simply hint at his existence throughout the show, giving him a cameo in the credits of the final episode.
The changes to the character Steven Grant were phenomenal. Taking him out of New York where there are already way too many heroes and placing him in London gave a fresh take on the character. Taking away his billionaire playboy status and turning him into a history nerd, focusing on Egyptian Mythology was a great touch that helped him be tied to Khonshu and his entire theme much better.
They even changed Marc’s backstory to a much better backstory than what he has in the comics. In the comics, his father was a rabbi who abused him because he didn’t like that Marc was violent. Marc would play war games with his brother as a child, and eventually Marc did leave for the military when he was old enough. But his brother was still alive at this point. And they didn’t have a mother, or well, she was dead.
In the show, we see a very valid reason for the DID to form, just like in the comics, but this one was visceral. Most people have known nothing but unconditional love from their mother. Not everyone, of course, but most people. And to see a mother so violently turn against her son, so vehemently hate him for something he had no control over, it hit hard.
And of course, Oscar Isaac’s performance sold so many scenes. As far as I’m concerned, he delivered a better performance in this show than any of the other actors delivered in any of the MCU movies.
Then of course we’ve got Arthur Harrow, a character that appeared 1 time in the comics and was basically a nobody who did nothing. They turned him into a great villain. His mind was He thought that by doing good deeds, he could absolve himself, he could “balance his scales”. But when Ammit arrived on Earth, he realized there was nothing he could have done to balance his own scales. But now he learns that Ammit’s time being imprisoned has changed even her. She no longer had the same mentality she did before. Now she not only believed that people should be punished before they ever commit a crime, but she realized that she needed to be more ruthless. She needed to bend her own rules in order to ensure her success, and if that meant letting some villainous people live so that she could continue to prune the wicked from the Earth, then that’s what she was gonna do.
At the end of the day, it was a really fun show, with great acting and a solid plot. The changes made to the character for the sake of the MCU were excellent and I doubt most comic book authors could have executed the changes as well as the writers for the MCU did. (And I base this on all the horrible, absolutely atrocious, retcons that people like Jason Aaron and Danny Cates make constantly.)
so fractured by the things he’d done that he actually believed Minority Report was a great idea.
I’d give it an 8 or 9 out of 10.
#marvel#moonknight#ironman#tonystark#stanlee#superhero