Why You Shouldn't Watch Morbius

Spoiler Warning

Spoiler Warning for Spider-Man: No Way Home

I don’t normally write spoiler reviews for movies that have just come out, partially because I need to see a film at least two or three times before I can give a really in-depth analysis of it.

The problem is, Morbius deserves no such analysis. There’s barely even anything there to analyze. I’m also not writing this as a watch/don’t watch review because that isn’t even a question. There’s absolutely no reason to watch this movie and barely even anything to spoil, so I’m just going to explain why it’s so bad and try to forget this movie exists (Edit: it also took me so long to finish this that Morbius has hopefully left theatres).

For a film like this, there’s three different ways you can look at it and analyze it (usually, I like to use all three).

First, you can view the film in light of how it relates to the film series as a whole and how it ties into the broader arc of that story.

Second, you can judge the film on how well it adapts the source material and how well it tells the story of the core characters.

Or, finally, you can look at as just another movie and see how well it holds up from a filmmaking/narrative perspective.

Most Marvel films are good under at least one of these perspectives. For example, some MCU movies aren’t all that interesting in their own right but tie into the main story enough that they’re still worth watching. Or sometimes there may be a movie that isn’t all that accurate to the comics but is still a well-made movie.

Morbius, on the other hand, fails on all three levels.

Now, the first aspect is the only one that I feel like actually merits a spoiler warning, but I promise you that any Spider-Man tie-ins you were hoping for are not worth seeing the movie for.

After No Way Home, I was excited to see how this film would tie into the others, and I knew from the trailer that Michael Keaton was returning as the Vulture. Given that he’s now one of the only Spider-Man villains we’ve seen in only one film, I wanted to see what they would do with him. I didn’t expect him to have a huge part in the movie, but that was the extra push I needed to go see the movie. Finally, there were rumors swirling that we would find out which of the three Spider-Man universes this would take place in.

Well, none of that mattered.

There are references to the Daily Bugle throughout the movie, but that’s it. The Vulture is not in the movie… not until the two mid-credits scenes, in which he appears in this universe and meets Morbius at the very end to ‘talk about Spider-Man’. So, all we know is that this isn’t the MCU (but we basically already knew that) and we can assume that this is the same universe as Venom (given that Morbius says ‘I am… Venom’ for no reason). However, all this could’ve been gathered from the trailers and the Vulture has almost as much dialogue in those trailers (and better dialogue at that) as he does in the film, so you’d be better off just watching those. Also, neither of his scenes in the trailer are in the movie… for whatever reason.

I can only hope that the Vulture returns to the MCU universe at some point, as seeing him get a re-match with Tom Holland would be far more interesting than seeing him team up with Morbius, Venom and Kraven.

I went into this movie hoping for more Vulture who ended up not being in the actual movie and when they finally did get to him in the post-credits, I hated what they did with him so much that I would’ve preferred he wasn’t in the film at all.

Now, admittedly, it’s fair to question how important this will be to some, or even most, audience members. Maybe some people seeing this movie aren’t huge Spider-Man fans and just want to see a Morbius movie… who is himself a Spider-Man character, but theoretically he could have enough of a fanbase that people want to see him get his own movie that’s about him and only him.

Well, if so, you’re going to be pretty disappointed because this movie has barely anything to do with the actual Morbius character. In all fairness, the first twenty minutes of the movie, while not well written, did feel like it was a Morbius movie. Dr. Michael Morbius does transfer into the Living Vampire aboard a large ship, before proceeding to kill nearly everyone aboard.

During this sequence, his new, vampiric features are kept in the shadows for the most part, as is typical of movie monsters. You can probably start to see that his new look is pretty bad even in this scene, but I assure you it gets worse.

Before I move onto why Morbius’ character fails, I’ll discuss the issue with his appearance. First of all, there’s no reason for Morbius’ features to be CG. For the most part, he looks like a human with paper-white skin. His cheekbones are a little more pronounced, his eyes are red, he’s got fangs and his nose is snout-like (more like a bat’s). All of this could easily be done with prosthetics. What’s more, his CG features in this film actually do look like those from the comics and could’ve been created with practical effects.

Now, let me be clear, I’m not against using CGI. I’m not even against using CGI to render characters that are more difficult to render otherwise (for example, I’ve frequently defended CG Yoda). The problem is, using CG for a character like this creates a distance between them and the audience. It’s more difficult to relate to someone who’s entirely CGI, because audiences don’t feel like they’re looking at a real person. If the effects are good enough, this won’t necessarily be a problem, but these effects aren’t good, or even okay. Not only that, but putting that emotional distance between the audience and the protagonist sucks out any last bit of interest the audience could’ve had with the character.

Of course, I didn’t expect this film to be a masterpiece. I knew there was going to be some cheap-looking effects, some poorly filmed and edited fight scenes… but the way Morbius looks isn’t even the problem. It’s the fact that, for the vast majority of the movie, Morbius just looks exactly like Jared Leto.

For those of you don’t know, once Michael Morbius transforms into the Living Vampire in the comics, he’s stuck that way… forever. He never reverts back to his normal, human form and remains the monstrous creature similar in appearance to the Morbius we occasionally see in this movie. He doesn’t transform when he gets angry or gets extra hungry for blood… his curse is permanent and constant. They diluted so many elements of his character to the point that this didn’t feel like a Morbius film, but a film where Jared Leto would occasionally turn into something that looked like Morbius.

Also, Morbius isn’t the supernatural type of vampire but is expressly created via science and doesn’t have all the same features we typically associate with vampires. The movie does get that right… but what it gets wrong is claiming that sunlight has no effect on Morbius whatsoever. What kind of vampire doesn’t get affected by sunlight? In the comics, sunlight doesn’t cause Morbius to burst into flames, but it does weaken him (to one extent or the other, depending on the needs of the writer) but this film didn’t even include that.

However, even past these flaws in Morbius’ look and powers, there’s a deeper problem with his character that’s possibly even harder to ignore: Morbius is by no means a villain. He’s barely even an anti-hero.

At first, when we see Morbius carve up a group of morally questionable (at best) mercenaries that are trying to kill him, it seems like maybe things won’t be so bad. After this, we see Morbius return to his lab and being discovering his powers. This has become a somewhat tired trope of superhero movies, but whatever. At least the movie’s still headed somewhere.

Then, we see Morbius start to wrestle with his blood lust, realizing he has to drink the synthetic blue blood that he created to stay in control. When his childhood friend, named ‘Milo’, who suffers from the same condition that Morbius did, learns of this, he begs Morbius to give him this “cure”. However, Morbius refuses because he realizes that the synthetic blood is satisfying his thirst less and less and he’ll soon be forced to resort to the real thing. Milo storms out, but only after secretly swiping a sample of this cure.

As Morbius struggles with his condition, we see a nurse ambushed in the halls and killed by a vampire in the shadows. For about five minutes, the movie tries to make you think that was Michael, before he is guilt-ridden by what he believes he did while unconscious, and is arrested… then the movie reveals it was Milo and Morbius never really struggles with his blood lust again. He never kills anyone, good or bad, until he kills Milo in the film’s final battle. He doesn’t feel like a vampire half the time, and he certainly doesn’t feel like a villain. Even the police detectives hunting him admit they don’t care that he killed the mercs on the ship early in the film.

But it’s not even just that Morbius isn’t at all a bad guy, he’s also basically a super-hero. He hunts down and kills Milo because he’s endangering people. If we saw him actively rescuing endangered citizens, no one would hesitate to call him a superhero.

All right, so it’s pretty obvious that the Spider-Man aspect of this film is almost entirely absent and therefore disappointing to anyone who wanted that. It’s also pretty clear that we didn’t get the super-villain movie many were hoping for. But what about as a movie? As just any random movie that someone with absolutely no connection or knowledge to these characters happens to watch, is Morbius a bad film?

Yes.

First of all, the problems regarding the bad CG used for Morbius will bother anyone, but the rest of the problems probably wouldn’t bother these audience members. They’ll be turned off by the bad dialogue, weak characters and terrible editing.

So, who are the characters? There’s Michael Morbius, the cliched scientist who has to experiment on himself to save his life and then has to pay a price for his recklessness, but since his transformation is barely a curse, it seems like he got a good deal. Then there’s his generic love interest, Francine, who is casually murdered in the film’s final act just to give Morbius more motivation to fight Milo. Milo himself is the cliched evil reflection of the protagonist, who goes into constant rants about how they’re superior to everyone around them. He’s also so devoid of any character of his own that as a child, he introduces himself to Michael under his real name, but Michael renames him Milo and everyone else in the film calls him Milo. There’s two random police detectives hunting Morbius, and then there’s Jared Harris’ doctor character that serves as a mentor to Morbius and Milo, and attempts to reason with Milo… only to be killed by him.

We’ve seen all of these characters a hundred times, and the movie doesn’t add anything to them. I didn’t care about the Michael/Francine romance. I didn’t feel anything when she and Jared Harris’ character were killed by Milo. I’ll admit, I did want to see Morbius defeat and kill Milo at the end, just because Milo annoyed me so much with his constant monologues and I wanted the movie to be over, but I don’t think that’s exactly the way the filmmakers wanted to see me invested in the film.

Jared Harris gets the only funny line in the film (though it probably wasn’t intended to be funny): “Let me introduce Dr. Michael Morbius, whose invention of artificial blood has saved more lives than Penicillin.”

Now, normally I would talk about the plot, but there isn’t really one so I don’t know what to say. I’ve already said everything that happened up until Morbius was arrested. After that, he breaks out and hunts down Milo. They fight, Milo wins and begins killing people while Morbius tries to catch up with him. I also think Morbius and Francine are creating a cure to their vampirism, but it doesn’t go anywhere, so I’m questioning if I just imagined that.

Okay, I looked it up and apparently this ‘cure’ was actually a deadly anti-coagulant that would kill either vampire if they were injected with it. Yes, the film’s so forgettable I forgot what weapon Morbius uses to kill Milo.

While they create the cure, Milo kills Jared Harris’ character, before tracking down Francine and killing her. He uses her as bait to draw Morbius to him… and then runs away. Thankfully, Morbius uses his bat SONAR to find him immediately after and they have their ‘climactic’ battle in the abandoned subway which has been infested with thousands of vampire bats.

This ‘fight’ is one of the most hilarious parts of the movie for me, simply because it’s edited so badly. At one point, they’re flying in the air and then they crash through the street, where the audience gets ‘treated’ to about five seconds of blurred shots of their surroundings spinning as they fall. Honestly, I could barely see anything of what was happening in the battle. I’ll admit, my vision isn’t the greatest, but even in poorly filmed action sequences, I have a general idea of what’s happening. I could follow the action of Taken 2, which included a cut every time someone threw a punch, better than the action in Morbius.

Also, if you thought the effects of Morbius’ face was bad, wait until you see the CGI used to show them running at super speed. I honestly can’t believe how bad it looks, because television shows have included better effects for the same powers going back twenty years (at least).

Anyway, after flying around the subway and smashing into some walls for a while, Morbius summons this army of vampire bats and causes them to pin Milo against a wall, before he injects him with the anti-coagulant and kills him. Now, if you’re asking why the bats don’t also help Milo, since he has the exact same powers… you’ve asked a good question, and one which the movie doesn’t even attempt to answer.

And then Morbius flies into the sky and the film mercifully comes to a close. It’s almost like the filmmakers recognized that there was nothing interesting about the characters, because they don’t even try to show any emotional change in Morbius or the other two characters who were still alive. There’s no closing dialogue or resolution to any of the non-existent character arcs, it just ends as soon as they finished up that action sequence because apparently they thought that was the way to go out on a high-note.

It's just such an abrupt ending, like it just… stops.

(Edit: I’ve heard rumors that apparently Francine reawakens as a vampire, but I have no idea if this is true, and I’m not rewatching the movie to find out).

Also, another new development that occurred while I was writing this review is that apparently there’s been some kind of push back to the popular consensus that this film is terrible. A lot of viewers are apparently saying that critics are being overly harsh and have just become so disconnected with that audiences want that they think this film is bad.

I have no idea what inspired this claim, because absolutely nothing in the movie merits such a response. Trust me, this film is every bit as bad as you’ve heard from the ‘haters’. There’s no reason to see this, even when it inevitably becomes free on a streaming service. I’ve tried to make an amusing review of the film’s flaws, but watching the movie was not funny or enjoyable in any way. It’s just a complete waste of time.

As a closing note, let me just say that if there’s any inaccuracies in my summary of the film, it’s the movie’s fault for being so terrible and forgettable that I’ve forgotten so many crucial plot points so quickly.