Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for Morbius. If you do not want to be spoiled, please leave the page. It will still be here after you've seen the film, if you so choose to return (and I hope you do). Possible spoilers for The Batman, as well, for reasons. Cheers!
Okay, so... I went to see Morbius on Tuesday (my local theatre of choice has cheaper tickets on Tuesdays since business is slow). I will freely admit, I went into this with Wikipedia knowledge of the character and some pretty low expectations. Between Jared Leto as the lead, a slew of bad reviews I kept seeing headlines for online (but not actually reading), and the fact that this is a solo Sony thing, I felt it was better to not get my hopes up at all. As my dad likes to point out, you can't be disappointed if you expect the worst.
Apparently my low expectations were still too high... I'm going to try and be nice, though.
Morbius opens with us taking a very short heli trip to someplace in Costa Rica I can't remember the name of, but it has 'de la muerte' ('of death' for anyone who doesn't speak Spanish and is too lazy to hit up Google Translate) in it, because of course it does. The helicopter lands (after we, the audience, are subjected to the camera kind of bizarrely following the cascade of a waterfall) outside the mouth of a cave, and our poor, shady heli pilot ominously says something about not wanting to be there after dark.
This is where we first meet Michael Morbius, as he descends from the helicopter and makes his way over to the cave mouth. He proceeds to give us some information on the hunting abilities of vampire bats, which I'm about 98% certain is not scientifically correct in the slightest, and then, and then, goes about collecting specimens of the bats in the most illogical, inefficient, improbable, ridiculous way possible!: He slices open the palm of his hand and holds it up toward the bats, which apparently sends them into a frenzy for whatever reason, and they all just whoosh out of the cave. There looked to be some sort of cage trap set up, so maybe he was just hoping to catch as many in that as possible and take them home, though why this man with a financial sponsor who had gobs of money didn't just order them on the internet or sommat, I don't know.
The presence of convenience storytelling with very little logic doesn't get any better at any point in the film.
Once back in New York, we find out that Michael is using the bats he collected to run experiments on human/bat chimera-ism (which I don't think is a word, but still). He's creating a Serum™, which we conveniently get to watch him do in the span of about two minutes (not a montage, he really just did it that fast because convenience), and he injects it into a lab rat. I had literally no idea what he was hoping to achieve with this rat, as the rat appeared to be healthy before the injection? But then it died. But then it was not dead and fine again?
So after one 'successful' rat trial, this man, Dr Michael Morbius, who it was established is a bit of a genius and got his Doctorate at the age of 19, who was set to win a Nobel prize for the invention of artificial blood, decides to go out on a boat just far enough away from shore as to be in international waters (which, no lie, when he was telling Milo about needing international waters, I thought it was a joke, but no, they were legit trying to be serious with it), with a crew that was at least twice as shady as the helicopter gang from Costa Rica and his bestie doctor friend, Dr Martine Bancroft, and test the serum on himself. Smart, yah?
Obviously, this didn't work out too well for him. It definitely didn't work out well for his shady crew of thuggish people with guns, seeing as he ended up killing all of them in a pretty classic example of new vampire blood lust.
Would like to point out, though, that Martine fell and hit her head and was thus knocked out. This is kinda used as a plot device to have Michael going after the crew, as one of them did cause her accident, and that's fine, but when Michael comes out of his frenzy and is back to 'normal', he goes to check on her. He, a medical doctor, goes to check on her, but then does practically nothing to help her. Or even to examine her. He covers her with a blanket, sends out a mayday distress call, then jumps overboard so he can... swim home, I guess.
Part of me feels I'm being too hard on the film, but then part of me remembers I spent almost $8 on a ticket to waste two hours of my life watching a story that only makes sense due to convenience and not due to actual storytelling. Then I feel like I'm being pretty fucking generous with my assessments...
As such, let's talk Milo/Lucien. The flashbacks presented to us in order to give insight into Michael and Milo's friendship don't actually do that. We do learn that Michael is a little shit who calls whatever kid is in the bed next to him Milo, no matter what that child's actual name is. Aside from this, I am assuming that these flashbacks are supposed to cover a certain amount of time, time that would allow bonding into a lifelong friendship, but that isn't what comes across from them. At all. They seem short and disjointed, so when Michael asks about Milo when Dr Nicholas is suggesting he go off to college (for super conveniently fixing a machine with a ball point pen), it seemed a bit weird.
Adult Milo is played by the amazing Matt Smith, and I had heard that he was pretty much the only thing carrying this movie. To anyone who praises Smith's acting in this movie, I sadly have to say, go sod off, please, and actually observe him in a role under a competent director. And to the director who managed to make Matt Smith, the fucking brilliant Matt Smith who, at 26 years old was cast as the oldest (at the time) incarnation of the Doctor and played him beautifully and made so many people eat their words that he was too young for the role, to make that Matt Smith come across poorly in a role... There is a special ring in Hell for you. Daniel Espinosa should absolutely be ashamed of himself.
I did like the nod to Doctor Who, though, when Milo says his pain is at an 11. I feel like I may have been the only person in the theatre (out of the whole 8-10 other people, and I might be overestimating there) who got the reference.
Part of the problem with Milo's character is that there isn't anything given to us to actually explain him. He's so fucking flat it isn't even funny. Like pretty much all the characters in this bloody film, he's just there. Sure, we get a flashback of him getting beaten up by bullies as a child, and there's allusions to the fact that he's rich enough to not feel the need to be bound by silly societal rules, but there's no meat to any of it. He's supposed to be the childhood friend of the main character of the movie, and usually we're supposed to be able to get attached to people like that, because when they become the villain, it's always a tragedy and a horrible choice that the protagonist has to make for the greater good, etc, etc, etc... (Harry Osborn in the original Spider-Man trilogy is a good example of this.)
Milo died, and I didn't actually care because there was practically nothing to care about.
Hell, Dr Nicholas and Martine also died (well, Martine kinda died), and I didn't feel anything about either of them, either.
I think that's the true folly of this film: there's not actually anything to get attached to. The characters, all of them, are pretty flat and dull. Convenience storytelling with little to no logic is not something new in movies (there's a few instances of it in The Batman, for instance, such as when Penguin is pointing out Riddler's 'bad' Spanish or the fact that we're expected to believe Bruce is carrying around that bulky Batsuit in his normal sized rucksack), but if you pair that with a cast of characters that the audience can't connect with? That's a recipe for a flop, plain and simple.
Please understand, I actually wanted to like this film. The trailer looked awesome (and I'mma talk about that shit in a sec), and I know critics can be overly harsh with their reviews of movies sometimes. Fans are even worse... The number of people ragging on The Batman would make someone think it is a shit film, but it's basically the best Batman film to date. So a part of me was hoping that, despite their history with Marvel films, that Sony maybe learned something working with Marvel Studios and made a good film. They did fine with the Venom ones, after all.
But, no... That was not the case.
I think Morbius actually needed to be longer, runtime-wise, to give time for more storytelling so that the audience could connect with the characters or maybe it could have a cohesive plot. Pacing in a film is exceedingly important... One issue I have with The Batman is pacing, as some of its scenes come off as being overly long, but I do think I'd rather have a film that is drawn out a bit too much but still is able make me feel a connection to the plot and characters over one that rushes through. Especially when it's an origin story for a 'lesser known' character (I don't know how popular Morbius comics are, honestly, but don't think he's the level of the Hulk or Deadpool [using anti-heroes instead of heroes, as that's more what Morbius is, from what I've read on Wiki]).
Going back to Milo's death, though... Michael Morbius is a fucking prick. He took two syringes with that toxic medley in it. One for Milo, one for himself. What does he do, though? He murders his 'best friend' and then runs off in a cloud of bats. I could maybe, almost forgive him for it, as it is stated that actual human blood (as opposed to the Bantha milk blood) makes them more... I dunno, feral? It's implied to be the reason Milo became so murder-y. Problem is, the first blood Michael had after his transformation was human blood... from 12 people, I think is what the detectives said. He still managed to spend the next hour and a half trying to convince us that he still cares about the sanctity of human life and subsisting on artificial blood. Smells awfully like a plot hole.
I would, however, like to know why the fuck genius Dr Michael Morbius didn't, you know, try other animal blood? Vampire bats don't actually drink from humans often. Hell, they don't even much care for wild animals. Most common vampire bats go after livestock, because they're easy prey (and hairy-legged and white-winged vampire bats go after birds... and sometimes goats). They also don't drain their prey, but I guess we can put that down to the gluttony of the human part. Either way, did he even bother to think that maybe, just maybe, he could get some blood from a butcher's shop and not become some hangry killing machine? Could we at least have had that scene or an allusion to one that would show a, you know, scientist doing science-y shit? No? Okay...
So... about that trailer that made the film look good. I do understand that is entirely the point of a trailer, and sometimes─ oftentimes─ they show all the good parts and everything else in the film is just okay. This trailer, though? This trailer is a web of lies! The line where Michael is saying the cure was a curse? Contextually changed. The part where Milo is telling Michael to accept that he's the bad guy? Not in the film. The quip about The Lost Boys and Michael replying, 'The story of my life'? Not in the film. Adrian Toomes greeting Morbius with 'Michael Morbius!'? Not. In. The. Fucking. Film. And Vulture only shows up in the post credits scenes. What fucking film uses their post credits scenes in a fucking trailer?
Speaking of which, where the fuck did Vulture get his costume from? MCU Adrian Toomes had a Guy (Phineas Mason, aka the Tinkerer) who helped develop that suit from alien technology left over from the Battle of New York. Morbius takes place on the same Earth that Venom does (the detectives reference the stuff in San Francisco early in the movie, and I'm pretty sure that Michael tells that counterfeiter whose hand he broke [Hippocratic oath, yeh...] that he was Venom, but I could be wrong there), so the Chitauri invasion didn't happen. Hell, there's no evidence that any of the Avengers or Loki or Thanos exist on that earth. So where did it come from?
And why is it automatically Spider-Man's fault he universe jumped?
Anywho. I would also like to point out a very small gripe I have (buried underneath all the other, much larger gripes), and that is the soundtrack. I love listening to film and television soundtracks. I have a station on Pandora that I have named Life's Little Geeky OST, and it was started from the Doctor Who soundtrack, and plays all sorts of fun stuff like The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Game of Thrones... and lots and lots of Batman... Because of that, I think, I noticed it. There are significant bits of Morbius' soundtrack that sound like Hans Zimmer's scores for The Dark Knight trilogy. It sounds enough like it that I went to look up the composer for Morbius' score. I didn't think it'd be Hans Zimmer, and I was right. It's by a guy named Jon Ekstrand. The music isn't bad, and it isn't like it's actually copying, but it was enough for me to notice and go hmm... As I do.
I will say, though, that in the grand scheme of things, this isn't the worst movie I've ever seen. (As a note, though, that position is held by The Last Airbender, so it's a pretty astronomically high bar to beat as the worst.) It does have some fairly enjoyable parts peppered in, and the CGI isn't bad.
Overall, I think I'll give it a 4/10.
If you like the things that I write and are able, please consider supporting my work by maybe buying me a coffee on ko-fi? Thanks so much!