Oscar Isaac's multiple personalities: a review of the "Moon Knight" series
A multi-genre attraction set in Egyptian mythology.
The fourth phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is slowly but surely gaining momentum, continuing to expose audiences to increasingly unexpected and increasingly less textbook plots. Even during the "Wanda Vision" phase, it became apparent that Disney's new streaming service was intended to be a kind of laboratory for experiments that are too risky, simply put, financially unsafe to implement on the big screen. While Marvel's flagship characters in the filmography continue to live up to the precepts of traditional superheroics, the studio's series characters are sent into uncharted territories of postmodernism, where entirely new genres and forms of storytelling live on.
Stephen Grant (Oscar Isaac) is a small-time historical museum employee who suffers from periodic memory lapses and apparent insecurity. Stephen has an excellent grasp of Egyptian mythology and recites French poetry from memory, but when it comes to social skills, he has a hard time. After another fall out of reality, Stephen witnesses a meeting of the cult of the ancient goddess Amat, and also learns that all this time a second personality has been living in his mind - former mercenary Mark Spector (Oscar Isaac), it was he who from time to time "took" control of the body to himself. It turns out that Spector possesses unique powers bestowed upon him by the ancient moon god Honsu. Indebted to the Egyptian deity, Spector must do everything in his power to stop Amath's imminent rebirth.
"Moon Knight" starts without too many preludes and immediately throws us into the thick of things: there is no time to get to know the new character, and he, in fact, does not know himself very well. Stephen Grant is a blank canvas created some time ago by Mark Spector, a man with a dark past, a broken loner hero who has been through death, violence and the hottest spots on the planet. In this character, Isaac echoes a bit of his previous role, William Tell in Paul Schroeder's Cold Calculation. Only, unlike Tell, Spector is not free from either inner demons or the looming external threat.
For Marvel, which is used to drawing its inspirational stories around strong and unprecedentedly noble characters, Mark Spector was a real revelation - a mercenary suffering from dissociative identity disorder is weak even for anti-hero status, far from a classic protagonist like Thor or Captain America. The representative, complex, contradictory and unpredictable Spector in some DC universe could well take his place in the Arkham Asylum along with the Joker, the Scarecrow or the Enigma. It is noteworthy that in Marvel Comics he was destined for a different fate: the Moon Knight was conceived as a temporary antagonist of the main character, but because of his great popularity he ended up with his own graphic line, having transformed himself along the way from a villain into a man, though endowed with a moral compass, but completely lacking in inner harmony.
In a world oversaturated with films about becoming a hero, such a character looks like a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. To tell his story, however, requires a mind inquisitive and far removed from commercial cinema, working not with algorithms but with one's own intuition. The duo of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson turned out to be such a collective mind - for many years these independent filmmakers have been practically creating art "on their knees", acting as directors, writers, cameramen and even actors in their own pictures, usually chamber horror films with a penny budget and a minimum of special effects. Needless to say, on the set of "Moon Knight" Benson and Moorhead was where to go: their ability to create atmosphere with a minimum of improvised materials here has proved to be just right. With the duo's light touch, the sandy Egyptian crypts were bathed in ominous shadows, and the mirrored elevator became a metaphor for the split Spector/Grant mind.
And if the first series of "Moon Knight" gravitated more and more to the genre of a mystical thriller, by the fourth series the series completely turned into an adventure quest, shot in the best traditions of "The Mummy" and "Indiana Jones". What to expect next is unknown. However, the creators are clearly not going to limit themselves to surprises.
This article was sponsored by Carol McLendon
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