Moon Knight: Marvel’s seductively dark streaming series

With two international superstars headlining, Marvel’s new streaming series screams “worth your attention”.

Marvel Studios pumps out a lot of movies and TV shows. You can’t swing a cat without hitting one.

Just when you think fatigue and indifference is bound to set in for all but the most superhero-inclined, it rolls out a title with Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke.

If you want to declare that every project is worth your attention, then you cast screen luminaries such as Isaac and Hawke. Especially with someone such as Hawke, it’s not that he’s a storied actor with huge projects on his resume, but he’s someone who always makes interesting choices even if they don’t always stick the landing.

So if even Hawke is surrendering to the Marvel machine, then there must be something in it.

There is. Moon Knight, adapted from one of the more obscure characters from the comic book house’s teeming archives, is a departure from most of Marvel’s standard fare.

Oscar Isaac plays a man with dissociative personality disorder. Picture: Marvel Studios

For a studio behemoth that’s usually content with a tonal consistency across its releases, Moon Knight is less quippy, less earnest and less expected.

It has a trippy, discombobulating vibe, putting the audience in the headspace of its confused protagonist, a character with something akin to dissociative identity disorder.

It’s well balanced between keeping you off-kilter and interested without being so muddled as to turn you off, especially for a series that’s slow to reveal its hand.

Ethan Hawke makes his Marvel debut in Moon Knight. Picture: Marvel Studios

The first personality the audience meets is Steven Grant, a mild-mannered British man who works in a museum gift shop. His boss treats him with contempt and the closest thing he has to a friend is a one-finned goldfish.

Steven is nervy, a ball of anxious energy that always seems one provocation away from fainting. But social anxiety isn’t his main problem – it’s that he needs to chain himself to his bed at night. Steven blacks out and has vivid, horrific dreams.

That’s because Steven is an alternate personality for Marc Spector, an American mercenary who turns out to be an earthly avatar for the Egyptian moon god Khonshu (voice of F. Murray Abraham).

And Khonshu is pitched in battle against another god, Ammit, who is served by the charismatic and menacing cult leader Arthur Harrow (Hawke). Harrow is all about remaking the world through mass murder, so he and Ammit needs to be stopped.

What does the earthly avatar of an Egyptian god look like? This. Picture: Marvel Studios

Moon Knight is a seductively dark series that manages to be both eerie and shadowy and full of hijinks. As the series goes on, there are more Indiana Jones-style romps thanks to the show’s Egyptian archaeology sandbox.

At times wild and bonkers, Moon Knight is elevated by its two superstar leads with Isaac and Hawke bringing their A-game commitment to roles that could’ve been silly. Even though they’re clearly having fun with it, you never feel like they think their characters are weird or dumb.

That makes all the difference because it makes you want to go along for the ride.

Moon Knight streams on Disney+ on Wednesday, from March 30 at 6pm AEDT.