The Director of MOON KNIGHT Slams How Egypt is Portrayed in Films, Says WONDER WOMAN 1984 Is Disgraceful
The director of Marvel’s Moon Knight, Mohamed Diab, is not very happy with Hollywood and how Egypt has been portrayed in films over the years. This is something that the Egyptian filmmaker wanted to change in his upcoming Marvel series, which is heavily influenced by Ancient Egyptian mythology.
In an interview with SFX Magazine/GamesRadar, Diab opens up about how the portrayal of Egypt in the series was a key element of his pitch to Marvel. He said:
“In my pitch, there was a big part about Egypt, and how inauthentically it has been portrayed throughout Hollywood’s history. 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."
The writer and director then brings up Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 and uses that as an example of what he’s talking about and goes as far as calling it a disgrace due to its depiction of Middle Eastern stereotypes:
"You never see Cairo. You always see Jordan shot for Cairo, Morocco shot for Cairo, sometimes Spain shot for Cairo. This really angers us. 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."
Well, Diab is looking to change things up with Moon Knight, and when making the film, his goal was to keep it fun but authentic:
"[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. 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.”
The show is "a new globetrotting action-adventure series featuring a complex vigilante who suffers from dissociative identity disorder. The multiple identities who live inside him find themselves thrust into a deadly war of the gods against the backdrop of modern and ancient Egypt."
The synopsis goes on to say that the story follows Steven Grant, “a mild-mannered gift-shop employee, who becomes plagued with blackouts and memories of another life. Steven discovers he has dissociative identity disorder and shares a body with mercenary Marc Spector. As Steven/Marc's enemies converge upon them, they must navigate their complex identities while thrust into a deadly mystery among the powerful gods of Egypt.”
The series also stars Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke as the main villain, a cult leader named Arthur Harrow. Moon Knight was created by Doug Moench and Don Perlin and appeared in the August 1975 issue Werewolf by Night #32. Jeremy Slater (The Umbrella Academy) and Beau DeMayo (The Originals and The Witcher) writing the series. Mohamed Diab, Justin Benson, and Aaron Moorhead are directing.
Moon Knight will be released on Disney+ on March 30th.