Moon Knight (Disney+)

[Trippy]

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Krla_UxRg

March 30.

[Khaldun]

They're definitely going for "Moon Knight is crazy as fuck with multiple personas/identities and some kind of mystical thing", so that's good, because that's really what keeps him from being ersatz Batman.

[Salamok]

Sign me up.

[MahrinSkel]

Gonna be a one-off: Star just died in a skiing accident.

--Dave

[Trippy]

He's not the main character.

[Tale]

Dead actor is Gaspard Ulliel who plays Anton Mogart / Midnight Man.

Marc Spector / Moon Knight is played by Oscar Isaac.

[Teleku]

Midnight Man is a villain, so there is a decent chance he got killed off in the first season anyways.

[Khaldun]

I felt like an ass, but that's exactly what I said to my wife when she read me the news story. "He probably died in the show anyway, so not a problem for Marvel."

[schild]

I felt like an ass, but that's exactly what I said to my wife when she read me the news story. "He probably died in the show anyway, so not a problem for Marvel."

Honestly, this probably saved them money.

[Khaldun]

Watched the first one.

It's both good and yet frustrating. Part of the problem is that the Steven Grant persona is not very interesting and is in fact kind of annoying. Either he's going to need some depth and maturity eventually as our viewpoint character or we're going to spend all of our time desperately begging for Spector and Khonshu to take the driver's seat.

In the comics, Grant is kind of a faux-Bruce Wayne/Lamont Cranston type; Moon Knight has one other 'civilian' persona who is a taxi driver/working-class joe. I understand why they didn't do a conventional rich guy who is secretly a vigilante, but a dude who feels like he got lost on the way to being a minor character in "Office Space" doesn't seem like a huge improvement.

Isaac is good, though.

[eldaec]

Watched the first one and hated it.

I can see how it could become good if they decide to make Steven not pointless and annoying.

Maybe he is going to be the smart one or something.

But I was bored of the 1st episode concept with 5 minutes and they did nothing new for the rest of the episode.

If ever there was a case for releasing ay least 2 episodes in the first week, this was it. I'm hoping we're over the 'Steven's Shit PoV' concept now.

[Trippy]

If ever there was a case for releasing ay least 2 episodes in the first week, this was it. I'm hoping we're over the 'Steven's Shit PoV' concept now.

Coincidentally that's what they are doing for Obi-Wan Kenobi.

[Sky]

I loved it, of course. Only thing that took me out of it a bit was the voice acting, that was jarringly bad (not the actor, whom I dig, but the accent/timbre reminded me of optimus prime in that megan fox movie). The rest I thought was pretty well-done, if a bit rushed.

I completely disagree about the Steven character, seeing the action from his perspective was great and the character setup was needed to establish that perspective. Worked great for what they're doing.

[Khaldun]

I think it worked great but only if that's an establishing frame and we're going to quickly move beyond it. If Grant remains more or less the same and we're mostly stuck with him or in his life, that's going to get old fast.

[Setanta]

Intriguing, but "meh". As someone who hasn't read the comics, I'd rate it there with Hawkeye. Which I also didn't really enjoy, and gave up on.

[eldaec]

Episode 2

First half 'oh god make it stop', seriously how long are we doing failure to communicate as a substitute for plot.

Second half 'ok not bad' but why the hell didn't you use some of the first 25% of the entire runtime of the series to show me some of this shit rather than have guys sitting around expositioning at me for half an hour when you finally realise you better catch the audience up.

I'm quite hopeful 'Moon Knight - the good TV show' starts next week. The Oscar Isaac & Oscar Isaac buddy cop show has potential if they stop whining at each other.
 

[Khaldun]

I thought this wasn't bad--it moved it along a fair amount. Khonshu actually has some personality, which I like. I wonder if we're going to get some form of explanation about what the Egyptian "gods" are considering that the explanation of the Asgardians was "superpowerful advanced aliens". Layla is a good character--much better than Marc Spector's lover in the older comics, who was pretty much just a copy-paste of Lamont Cranston's old girlfriend in The Shadow.

Sort of surprised that the people in the bus etc. watching Moon Knight fight the invisible jackal didn't think he was a really amazing mime.

[Samwise]

I have zero prior familiarity with Moon Knight.  My reaction to the first episode was "okay, multiple personality slash werewolf tropes, BOOOOORING".  When they introduced "dueling cults" in the second episode I got a lot more interested.

[MahrinSkel]

Starting with "the idiot" in charge was a choice. Is he a strictly manufactured identity (he leaves voice-mails for his mother, she's never on the phone)?

They want us to like this confused everyman, and mostly succeed. If he's just a manufactured cover, that's one thing. If he's an actual person, that another.

Anyway, AAA first tier entry in the MCU.

--Dave

[Khaldun]

Yeah, they're playing around with a kind of Manchurian Candidate question now: does Steven Grant even exist? In the 2nd episode, I got the vague sense almost that he's Marc Spector's attempt to be a better romantic partner for Layla, e.g., he's planning to finish out his work for Khonshu and 'retire' to Grant (where he also can protect her from Khonshu just in case).

They played around with this idea in the major comics run that defined the character--that his Grant and Jake personas (Jake is a tough working-class cab driver) are Spector's creations but that Spector has committed so hard to them that he's actually forgotten that they're personas, sort of a Method-acting-run-amok thing. Though in that same run, they treated Khonshu as a psychological crutch as well rather than a real spirit or god, whereas in this case they're not playing around with that much--there's confirmation that he's real on multiple levels.

I liked seeing the 'suit' version of the 'suit'--that's from Warren Ellis' short Moon Knight run that had some interesting ideas in it about the character.

[TheWalrus]

I like this show, but boy do I hate Grant. He works as a character, I just really hate the character. Stop being so damn monumentally stupid. I understand why Khonshu calls him the idiot. He fuckin is.

[Velorath]

Eh, he's the idiot to us because we're familiar with TV/comic book tropes and understand that Marc/Moon Knight is ostensibly the hero of the story, so anytime Steven does something like run off with the scarab we know he's making a bad choice. He behaves in an understandable way though. Marc and Khonshu aren't exactly forthcoming despite all the opportunities they've had to fill Steven in anything that's going on, and we're already seeing that Khonshu doesn't seem like a particularly noble deity. He only seems "good" in comparison to Ammit.

[Phildo]

This is a guy who's had to chain himself to his bed so that he doesn't wake up in strange circumstances or places, just finding out that those strange circumstances are "international American mercenary in the service of an ancient Egyptian vengeance god."  Fully understandable that he's not processing it well and not listening to them now that they're speaking.

[Sky]

I mean, that's the whole point and what makes it interesting.

[Khaldun]

I think it's maybe further evidence that Steven is Spector's "retirement scheme"--he has to keep Steven out of the loop because it's important that Steven know nothing about any of this, only now that's busted; Spector is still trying to hold on to the possibility, though. But that's why Spector won't answer questions straight up.

I sort of wish we weren't trapped in the conventional "I punish crime after it is committed" vs. "I want to stop crime before it ever happens" plot trope. At least if it turns out Ammit has something a bit like Strange's Time Gem so that Ammit can in fact accurately see what the probabilities are for the future actions of people then that trope sharpens up a little bit--it's more like Johnny Smith having to decide in The Dead Zone whether he'll kill American Hitler or not.

[Khaldun]

Third one was decent, plot is accelerating some. Raises questions about who the Egyptian gods are/where they are esp. in relationship to the Asgardians. I wonder if they're going to throw in the Greek gods eventually w/Hercules.

Also raises questions about the Eternals, in that they were around at the point that the Asgardians visited Earth and these Egyptian gods popped up. As is pretty much the case for Earth in any superhero universe, MCU Earth is starting to look like a place at the center of the universe rather than a primitive backwater.

EDIT: Looking at the Love and Thunder teaser trailer, that looks a lot like Zeus with his thunderbolt in Olympus...and the bad guy is supposedly Gorr the God-Butcher, so maybe here comes Hercules. (Considering Gorr's M.O., it might be a one-time appearance...)

[eldaec]

Yeah, I liked it.

A bit dry maybe, and still a little too keen to have failure to communicate be the major driver of plot.

But interesting that it is almost as dark as a netflix defenders show. And appreciated Steven being allowed to be less shit.

[Khaldun]

Yeah. I wish Steven frankly had been less shit from the outset? I guess they were trying to avoid the cliche of Steven being a professor etc. (the whole thing already references Raiders too much) but having Steven be just a gift shop dude who was afraid of everything was tedious at the start.

[Sky]

But how do you feel about the Stephen character?

[Khaldun]

How about you tell us why you love him just as he has been from the outset?

[eldaec]

This is good now.

The end bit seemed a bit too much like they were doing legion. Hope it has a payoff.

[rattran]

I laughed out loud at the end of the episode. Kudos.

[Surlyboi]

Yeah, this one went sideways in the best way possible.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, it was interesting.

I almost wish they'd not done the standard Raiders tomb-hunting stuff, though maybe there's more going on with that than meets the eye, given the cheesy Raiders-knockoff video that pops up at the end. It would have been interesting to have the whole show set more in the context of contemporary Egyptian or North-East African politics with Egyptian mythology/relics being kind of a side element.

I wonder if Anton Mogart aka The Midnight Man is going to reappear in the last two episodes in something more like his comic-book form or if that one appearance was it.

[Sky]

I guess I should apologize to good ol' Bra'tac, because the person who voiced the goddess of fertility was atrociously inappropriate as an ancient goddess. Nothing says fertility like a valley girl, I guess?