Moon Knight director blasts Wonder Woman 1984’s depiction of Egypt
By Dan Selcke
Moon Knight is Marvel’s next big Disney+ show. It stars Oscar Isaac as the titular superhero, who has multiple personalities.
Moon Knight’s superpowers come courtesy of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Egyptian mythology is a big part of the story in general, so it’s fitting that Egyptian director Mohamed Diab will direct four of the show’s six episodes. “[It’s] part of the show because it’s part of the comic book. It’s part of how he gets his powers. It’s ingrained in it.” Diab told SFX Magazine. “There was definitely room to play [in Moon Knight] but keep it as authentic as possible, in the realm of being fantastical. Even in the original comic books they did a great job of researching and trying to make Egypt authentic.”
It’s great to hear that Diab will be treating the Egyptian themes of Moon Knight with the depth and detail they deserve, something he doesn’t think other Hollywood productions do often enough. “In my pitch, there was a big part about Egypt, and how inauthentically it has been portrayed throughout Hollywood’s history,” he said. “It’s always exotic—we call it orientalism. It dehumanizes us. We are always naked, we are always sexy, we are always bad, we are always over the top.”
Moon Knight director thinks Wonder Woman 1984 sequence is “a disgrace”
And Diab didn’t confine himself to generalities. He named another big superhero project he thought was guilty of this approach: Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984, which came out in 2020. That movie featured a section where Wonder Woman travels to Cairo, talks to a shiek, and saves some children playing soccer on the side of a highway in the middle of the desert for some reason.
“You never see Cairo. You always see Jordan shot for Cairo, Morocco shot for Cairo, sometimes Spain shot for Cairo. This really angers us,” Diab said. “I remember seeing Wonder Woman 1984 and there was a big sequence in Egypt and it was a disgrace for us. You had a sheik—that doesn’t make any sense to us. Egypt looked like a country from the Middle Ages. It looked like the desert.”
Moon Knight premieres tomorrow, March 30, on Disney+!
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