Moon Knight is an okay show instead of a good movie

Moon Knight's first four episodes didn't exactly impress me, but they indicated the story had some yet to be tapped potential I hoped the last two would manage to get flowing. Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the final third of the show goes to some of the interesting places I wanted to see. Unfortunately, it's too little, too late to be more than an okay show overall.

Because this is the best example yet of Marvel watering down and dragging out a plot and concept that could easily have been turned into a far shorter and better movie. Sure, parts of the first four episodes are intriguing, fun and thought-provoking, but a disappointingly large amount of them end up being outright boring and unnecessary build-ups spoon-feeding us information the showrunners apparently think we wouldn't understand unless it was reiterated every fifth minute. Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and crew do their very best to alleviate parts of this with some decent acting, leading to a handful of memorable scenes that usually have nothing to do with the other parts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

That last part is especially worth taking note of, as Moon Knight's strength continues to be the lack of references to the known MCU. Having what's basically a blank page brings a breath of fresh air to the well-worn formula by making it more interesting to speculate about what's actually going on and where things are going. This new take also applies to the show's direction. Both the pacing, cinematography, humour and themes differentiate themselves from most of the other Marvel films and shows, which brings me to the reasoning behind my headline.

The show's biggest downfall is, as previously mentioned, that it's more quantity than quality. This could have ended up doing the same for Moon Knight as the first Iron Man movie did for Tony Stark if only Marvel had decided to cut some of the filler and just make a movie instead. Episode five and six feel like the final acts of a movie with some great drama and action that build upon some cool groundwork laid out by what should have been far more compacted earlier episodes. I'll say this is what we'd get if Iron Man had been a show where four of the six episodes focused on Tony Stark building his first suit in the desert before the finale two were everything beyond that. Instead we got a movie with far better pacing and structure that trusted us as viewers to at least put some of the pieces together, something I think Moon Knight would have benefited greatly from as well.

I say this because Moon Knight isn't a bad show. It just overstays its welcome by having far too many extremely forgettable scenes that lack any sense of value outside of hammering certain plot details over the heads of viewers that make regular Hulk seem like Mister Fantastic in comparison. Such a shame when the final parts of the show prove that this could have been something truly special, even though they're agonisingly predictable, if only the first episodes had far less fluff and were executed better.