The wait is finally over, and Moon Knight is now streaming on Disney Plus, with countless fans no doubt having stayed up all night to ensure they can check out the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest offering from the very second it goes live on the platform.
The reviews have been enthusiastic without veering into universal acclaim, but the general consensus is that the six-episode event series has indeed lived up to the constant hype touting it as a major tonal departure for the MCU, and unlike anything we’ve ever seen from Kevin Feige’s franchise before.
A key part of that is having a protagonist who suffers from dissociative identity disorder, with Oscar Isaac facing a tough task in bringing so many personalities to life and making them stand apart from each other. It was a challenge for the filmmakers, too, with director and executive producer Mohamed Diab explaining his process in an interview with ComicBook.
“First of all we have to give it to Jeremy Slater, ’cause there’s so many iterations of Moon Knight and all of them are interesting but to take the story and make Steven into someone that everyone can identify with him and all of a sudden that person discovers that he has a different identity which is a superhero, a genius pitch. I love that.
I tried to get to take that and to disorient the audience as exactly Marc and Steven. And by the way, one of the scariest things for me as a storyteller was the switch. We love Steven now, and all of a sudden switch. Now we’re with Marc, someone you know nothing about. He looks like him, he’s completely different. And he seems like a harder guy to fall in love with. But again, I think we succeeded in that. At least that’s what the people who saw the episodes are telling us.
But I mean I love this orientation and it’s exactly living through DID. Just very important to point out that as respectful as we were dealing with DID using experts and everything, this is not an accurate depiction of DID ’cause it’s still blended in the superhero world and it’s a bit fantastical. But I still would say that people are gonna learn about it just like I did.”
Having been a cult favorite among comic book readers for decades, Moon Knight is about to pull off the same trick with general audiences, meaning we should be seeing plenty of Isaac’s supernatural vigilante in the years to come.
