Moon Knight director Mohamed Diab has called out Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman 1984 for its depiction of Egypt.
Moon Knight is currently set to be released later this month, with new clips, posters, and interviews coming out far more frequently. One of the series’ directors, Mohamed Diab has been making his way across the interview circuit and isn’t holding back about what he thinks of other films. In particular, he has an ax to grind against the way Hollywood portrays Egypt and cannot stand the way his birth country was portrayed in Wonder Woman 1984.
In Wonder Woman 1984, Egypt played a role in Diana’s hunt for Maxwell Lord. In the film, she tracks him down to Egypt where he is meeting with an oil baron, resulting in a high-speed chance where she saves two children. The scene was noted as a controversial one and Moon Knight‘s Mohamed Diab isn’t holding back about what he thinks about it.
In a recent interview with SFX Magazine (via GamesRadar+), the Moon Knight director opened up about the scene and how stuff like that angers people from Egypt:
“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.
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.”
This is not the first time Mohamed Diab has criticized DC films for their depiction of people from Egypt. Recently the Moon Knight director called out Black Adam for not hiring Egyptian actors for the film. He did, however, note that the movie was based on an iteration that was not inspired by Egypt.
Here is the synopsis for Moon Knight:
The series 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.
Starring Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke, Gaspard Ulliel, and May Calamawy, the series is set to make its Disney Plus debut on March 30th. Stay tuned for all the latest news surrounding Moon Knight and be sure to subscribe to Heroic Hollywood’s YouTube channel for more original video content.
SFX Magazine (via GamesRadar+)
