Morbius is like Blade, only less fun and more confusing.
Inconsistency plagues the latest addition to Sony's competing Spider-Man universe.
The Short Take:
Unable to commit to a consistent tone or pace, Sony’s Morbius will only satisfy those in the mood for a middling, cheesy vampire-meets-comic-book-origin-story movie. Matt Smith steals the show. Watch or rewatch Blade (1998) on Netflix; you’ll have a lot more fun.
Image Credit: The New York Times
The Long Take:
The Internet has not been kind to this movie. I know I’m one of the more forgiving critics out there. It’s the teacher in me; I always want to see the good in something someone has made. So it’s unsurprising that I’d say the newest entry into the Sony Spider-Man Universe, Morbius, isn’t as terrible as some reviews say. It may not work as a film, but if you like comic books and/or vampires and promise me that you won’t think too hard about what’s going on, you’ll probably still have a fun time at the movies.
Sony’s second attempt to build out their own Spider-verse after the box office success of the Venom films is essentially a mediocre superhero origin story. Michael Morbius is a Nobel-prize-winning doctor who has dedicated his life to curing a rare blood disorder that he and his best friend, Milo, have had since birth. He tries to fuse vampire bat DNA with human DNA, tests the resulting experimental cure on himself and…well, it’s not hard to guess what happens from there. If you have any attachment to Morbius as a character or just enjoy seeing how comic book characters come into being, there’s probably enough here for you.
That said, Morbius is not a well-constructed movie. It never fully commits to the kind of story it wants to be. The tone is mostly serious (very serious), with little room for levity. That choice makes sense because Dr. Michael Morbius has a life-threatening, physically debilitating disease. We spend time in hospitals, watching children suffer from the disease. It’s hard to crack jokes when the lives of innocent kids are on the line. Jared Leto is also playing Morbius as a stoic, deadpan character. His desire to help people and do doctorly good is appealing, but his demeanor has all the charm of a lamppost. A steely-eyed, ponytailed, trench-coat-wearing, Goth’s dream of a lamppost, but stiff nonetheless.
This would fine, except the film tries to inject levity in random places, and that never blends with the more serious illness narrative at all. The two cops in pursuit of Morbius are especially out of place. They seem like they’re in a buddy cop film, hassling each other and delivering hokey one-liners. Again, I’m not opposed to that (quite the opposite, in fact), but it doesn’t belong in the same movie as Jared Leto’s more dramatic, un-ironic performance.
I did, however, enjoy Matt Smith’s similarly mismatched levity. In stark contrast to Jared Leto, he is as campy and over-the-top as he was in Doctor Who. He’s the only one who seems to be having any fun in the film, enjoying every moment as the hedonistic, spiteful counterpoint to his nobler wet blanket friend. I want to watch the version of this that matches that fun, “hamming it up” energy. I think that if Sony wanted to tell a self-serious, heartfelt story about a man trying to heal himself and the ones he loves, it should have committed more fully to that tone. It’s almost as if it became self-conscious and insecure, and then said “oh wait, Marvel movies that people like have jokes, so we need to get some jokes in here.” Moon Knight, which premiered on Disney+ last week, is a great counterexample of balancing and blending serious trauma with a lighter, more adventurous tone. It’s thinking about how to play those opposing forces off one another from the start rather than being mostly one thing and then sometimes slipping into another.
Image Credit: Entertainment Weekly
The inconsistent pacing of the film exacerbates this indecision about what kind of movie Morbius wants to be. The film spends a considerable amount of time in flashbacks to show how Michael and Milo learned to live with their illness as children and bonded in doing so. We also spend a lot of time watching Michael develop the cure when it was fairly obvious from the get-go that he was going to. This in of itself is not bad, but, since the film is (thankfully) less than two hours, it has to rush through all of the more action-packed plot once Morbius acquires his superpowers. Major events seem unearned or not as meaningful because they happen very suddenly. Sometimes I scratched my head and wondered what certain characters were actually trying to accomplish and why they were doing certain things. Questions you do not want to be asking during a film include “What is happening? and “How did we get here?” But, again, viewers who don’t care to ask these questions and just want to see scientists science and vampires vampire are probably going to be fine.
Really, I want Morbius to be more like Blade (1998), which arguably was the progenitor of the comic book movie blockbuster as we know it today. Wesley Snipes, who is incredibly cool as the “Daywalker” half-vampire, half-human vampire hunter, is so fun to watch because while Blade himself is a very serious character, Wesley Snipes and Director Stephen Norrington very clearly understand that this is a ridiculous action movie. I mean, he catches his sunglasses midair while fighting a gang of vampires! I don’t know how you reconcile such hero swagger with the more serious facing of mortality built into Morbius’ backstory — maybe that would have been impossible. At the very least, Sony and Director Daniel Espinoza should have done one or the other rather than haphazardly trying to have it both ways.
[The harsh SPOILER daylight approaches. If you plan to see the film, flap back here after you’ve seen it.]
Image Credit: The Hollywood Reporter
The comparison to Blade is an easy one to make because both films share so much in premise and plot. Both Blade and Morbius try to use a medically synthesized substance to curb their thirst for blood, and their respective films try to use the wearing off of the serum or synthetic blood to ramp up tension. Both heroes, on the brink of defeat, suck the blood of a female scientist and potential love interest so that they might survive. I would argue that this moment in Blade is much more empowering for Dr. Karen Jenson because she is at full strength at the time and makes the choice to sacrifice herself to take down the vampires. Dr. Martine Bancroft, on the other hand, is already lying on a rooftop, dying after Milo attacks her. So it’s more like a “well, I guess you’re dying anyway so might as well not waste your blood” moment for Morbius.
Would I go so far as to say that Morbius rips off Blade? It’s certainly tempting. I hesitate for two reasons: first, some light research indicates that Blade has been an adversary of Morbius in the comics. That’s not likely to happen on the big screen because Marvel/Disney already has a reboot starring Mahershala Ali in the works, but it might explain why they might resemble one another. Secondly, vampire stories have been around for so long that inevitably certain tropes will be recycled.
The general concept of mixing the supernatural and science, for example, dates back at least to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published on 1897. Van Helsing spends a significant portion of that novel explaining the science behind vampires to other characters who can’t believe they exist. And at the time of its publication, Victorians projected their anxieties about sex, blood, disease (namely syphilis), Darwin’s still burgeoning theories of evolution, crime, and moral degeneration onto the vampire. Many readers would have seen Dracula as Darwin’s natural selection gone wrong, trying to use a scientific theory to explain the social and cultural shifts of which they did not approve. This is the same anxiety that sentenced Oscar Wilde to prison for his sexuality. (Forgive the digression — I wrote an entire chapter of my dissertation on this and could talk about it all day.)
Therefore, Dr. Michael Morbius using genetic mutation to turn himself into a vampire isn’t as contemporary or groundbreaking an idea as you might think. He’s jumpstarting evolution in a way that Bram Stoker and Charles Darwin would not have anticipated, but the notion of science precipitating the supernatural is not in of itself new.
I’m having a hard time pinpointing the precise anxiety underpinning this iteration of that old idea, though. The conflict between Michael and Milo towards the end does have a homosocial bond, or, more crudely, “bros before hoes” subtext. Milo makes disparaging comments about Michael and Martine before he becomes a vampire, and afterwards he actually targets her, threatens her, and essentially murders her (or, more accurately, ends her life as a human). I could, if I squint a little, see a love triangle jealousy thing going on, but I doubt that’s what the film was going for.
Perhaps the anxiety centers around the science itself more — with CRISPR, MRNA vaccines, and other advances in genetic manipulation, a 2022 audience may see their own fears over modern medicine’s answers to their health problems in Dr. Morbius’ experiment. I can’t theorize about any of this cultural commentary confidently, though, because there just isn’t enough in the movie to point me in any particular thematic direction.
I’ve gone off the academic deep end in a way I never expected to here. At the very least my ramblings might give you more to think about when you watch the film (or after the fact if you’ve already seen it), because the film alone does not offer much on that front. By the end, I still don’t really know what Morbius is all about after having become a vampire, being horrified with what he has become, inadvertently making his best friend a total monster, and then having to fight said friend in order to clean up his own mess. Who is he and what will he do now? There’s no indication of that at all.
[ADDITIONAL SPOILER WARNING: I’m talking end-credits scenes next, so if you haven’t seen all the Marvel and Sony Spider-Man related movies recently and don’t want the end-credits scenes of those films spoiled for you, stop here.]
Image Credit: The Hollywood Reporter
In fact, I would say that the two end-credit scenes, which are the only parts of the film tying Morbius into the larger SSU, (Is that really going to catch on like MCU, Sony? What delusions of grandeur do you have here?) are incredibly confusing because the film proper doesn’t establish who Dr. Michael Morbius is once he becomes Morbius. First we see Vulture, played by Michael Keaton, appear after we see the the same rifts in the multiverse that sent Tom Hardy’s Venom from the SSU to the MCU (and back again). The Vulture’s appearance at first seems really random because — beyond being a Spider-Man villain and knowing that Morbius is, through the comics, connected to Spider-Man — he has no relationship or relevance to the film I just watched, Morbius.
Image Credit: Forbes
Even more confusing is Morbius driving up in a sports car to meet Vulture in the desert so that the recently displaced villain can try to team-up with the newly-minted hero…? Anti-hero…? Also villain…? Vampire about town? Again, it’s not clear who Michael Morbius has really become by the end of his inaugural film. Why would Morbius care about Vulture at all? Why is he driving a sports car now? Why would he find Vulture’s proposal “intriguing”?