...yeah, yeah, I've seen the memes. I've contributed to the memes.
The memes don't make this movie good.
Because, trust me, this movie is not good. It's not good at all. It's absolutely atrocious on virtually every level.
Bad. Bad. Bad.
So, where do we even begin with this? I guess it'll do to give a firm base with the actual comics character. Michael Morbius was a scientist who was born with a rare and eventually fatal blood condition. After studying biochemistry for several years, Michael decided to test a formula that used the DNA of a vampire bat and found himself miraculously cured... only at the cost of now having to drink human blood in order to survive. He's been a villain of Spider-Man (his first appearance in the Marvel universe being in Amazing Spider-Man #101, published in October of 1971), a prominent member of the Midnight Sons, the Legion of Monsters, and even S.H.I.E.L.D. for a time.
So how does this translate into film? Well, with Sony still straddling the fence on what characters they can and can't use in the films thanks to their deal with Disney, Spider-Man is excised from the backstory... for the most part, anyway. We'll get back to that in a bit. In the film, Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) is a scientist who... okay, never mind, they get the origin down pat, so I'll give the film a point there.
Funded by his best friend Lucien or "Milo" as he's jokingly called (Matt Smith) who also has the same condition and assisted by fellow biochemist Doctor Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), Morbius conducts experiments using vampire bats he had smuggled back to New York from a cave in Costa Rica, hoping to use gene-splicing to create a cure for his condition. As we've all seen from The Fly, this ends well for all parties involved and certainly has no terrible, unintended consequences.
So, Morbius becomes a blood sucking monster and while he attempts to use artificial blood to stem the tide it is slowly losing its effectiveness. With Lucien trying to force him to give him the same cure and the authorities after him following a massacre on a boat in international waters, Morbius is definitely in a lot of trouble. What time is it, you may ask?
...
...look, I'm trying to find any sort of joy and mirth in this.
...and no, he doesn't actually say that in the movie. I'm as disappointed as you are.
In what little praise I can give the film, Matt Smith does an excellent job as Lucien in showing the tragic (if quick) fall of a desperate man into outright villainy. Other than a weird bit where he has a shirtless dance scene (and no, it doesn't make any more sense in context), he does well. The few scenes that he has with Jared Leto do a lot to sell the pair as old friends.
That's honestly all I can really give the entire film in terms of praise. Jared Leto just isn't an actor that resonates with me, his bizarre eccentricities aside. He doesn't do a bad Morbius, but he isn't remotely the actor I would have picked for the role (seriously, was Aidan Turner just not available?). Bancroft being his love interest (I think?) acts as though she's barely awake through most scenes or is going for a really, really subdued performance that just... doesn't work. It's actually a good metaphor for the film in general. The actors are clearly trying, even Leto, it just... doesn't work.
Morbius sits in a weird spot with pacing where it is somehow simultaneously both too slow and too fast. It tries to rush through the origin of our hero and even the origin of his first villain and doesn't really give either event time to breathe. You get Morbius practicing with his new abilities... in one short pair of scenes, and that's it. Other than some issues with echolocation that he apparently deals with off-screen, he seemingly has total mastery over everything but the thirst.
The special effects are a little wonky in places. I like the aforementioned echolocation effects... and that's kind of it. Morbius and Lucien's vamp faces look a little goofy in some places and certain scenes are so dense with CGI that you can't see anything, such as it is in the final climactic showdown between the hero and the villain. Absolutely thrilling action... completely covered by CGI bats galore! All of that isn't even getting into the plot holes in a few places, characters suddenly knowing things that they shouldn't - such as a detective who knows exactly where to go to put Morbius at gunpoint after the man flees up several stories and onto the roof of a building... somehow managing to beat the Living Vampire's super speed in getting up there that quickly.
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| See? I morb as I please. |
Honestly, I don't know what else I can say. Morbius is a character that I've been eager to see an adaptation of in live-action. Getting introduced to him by the 90's Spider-Man: The Animated Series, I got to read the comics when I got older and really enjoyed it. I'm certain that anyone who reads my blog knows that one of my favorite supernatural creatures is the vampire.
There have been a few subtle hints.
Morbius' character is about his struggle to do good in spite of the curse placed upon him, as it is with many vampire stories. He tries to cling to his humanity in spite of the hunger within him, an apt metaphor for how our own vices can consume us and turn us into someone who is destructive and toxic. It is the struggle between one's better nature and one's own id that makes so many vampire stories so compelling.
Morbius doesn't really raise or even take a stab at answering those questions. By the end, Morbius has embraced his nature as a vampire in spite of going pretty much the entire film not wanting to drink human blood and even having developed an antibody to kill both Lucien and himself... which he admittedly never uses on himself like he was clearly planning to in a previous scene. Also, Bancroft is a vampire probably.
Also also... oh, right. We're getting back to the Spider-Man comment from earlier. So far as I can tell, like with Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius does not take place in a continuity with Spider-Man in existence. However... this gets muddied up a bit. You have certain things that come out of the Spidey mythos such as the Daily Bugle being a newspaper here as it was in Venom as well as Horizon Labs being where Morbius and Bancroft work.
...and then the Vulture shows up, having been carted in from Spider-Man: Homecoming. He gets teleported into a prison, where he's apparently given a hearing and then released due to the fact that "Adrian Toomes" apparently does not exist in this universe. We even get a bit of the purple tears in the sky from No Way Home before Toomes materializes in his cell. Now, given that Doctor Strange's spell was erasing people's knowledge of who Peter Parker was... this makes no sense. Toomes was in his native universe, all it should have done was wipe out his knowledge of Peter Parker.
Yet, he's there... and that's not the worst part.
He somehow has the Vulture suit. He doesn't have it when he's in the jail cell, but he shows up in a second post credits scene for Sony to flog that Sinister Six idea that they're apparently still determined to get out in lieu of good sense, and he suddenly has the suit. A suit, I'll remind you, that he built using alien technology from a completely different universe than the one he is currently in.
Also, he somehow knows it has something to do with Spider-Man... which makes no sense.
It really feels like Sony very, very desperately trying to hitch their wagon to the MCU and it just... doesn't work. It's a good metaphor for Morbius as I said before - it just doesn't work.
That's all, really. It's a jumbled mess that just doesn't work. Almost like nobody wanted to see a bunch of Spider-Man's villains running around with Spider-Man involved. Weird, innit?
Morbius is now available from Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, and Sony Pictures Releasing.
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