It’s no secret that the comic book genre has almost completely taken over the film world since the early 2000s. But could it be that in 2022 we have reached the stage of disgust? If you ask the general public, who flock en masse to the halls, the answer is probably no. But the desire of fans to get more and more movies, along with the desire of the studios to make more money, will sometimes lead to products that are simply not good and unworthy. And in my personal opinion, such is the movie “Morbius”, created at Sony Studios (in collaboration with Marvel).
For those who have not yet heard of the film – here is a brief background without spoilers: Dr. Michael Morbius is a gifted scientist suffering from a rare blood disease, in an attempt to cure himself he mixes in his blood a serum he has developed, which contains bat DNA. Swallow blood to survive. He also gains a host of vampire benefits – increased senses, speed and superpower, healing ability and flying ability. And last but not least – he is considered a villain in the comics universe and not a hero, with his main rival being Spider-Man.
I do choose to start with what’s good about the film – Jared Lato in the lead role (winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2014) and the thing that any comic book film can not do without – good effects, which I will expand on later.
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Leto holds the film on his shoulders, when it seems that while he was coming to work, everyone else just got to work. And that’s an important difference. Leto tries to remove the failure as the DC Joker in the movie “Suicide Squad” and gives it his all, but it’s just not enough when his support team just fails to show even the simplest emotions.
Aside from Dr. Morbius, the two main characters are those of Dr. Martin Bancroft (Adria Arhuna) and Lucian “Milo” Crown (Matt Smith), who embody his lab partner and Morbius’ best friend and main sponsor (respectively).
Aside from all three, Jared Harris gets very little screen time as Dr. Emile Nikos, who treated Morbius and Crown as children, and now continues to treat Crown well into adulthood until a cure is found for his condition, and Tyrese Gibson as an FBI agent.
Anyone looking for a plot, will not find it in this movie. The jumps from scene to scene and from place to place are simply made, there is no depth or logical explanation for what is happening, the twists are quite predictable and even the attempt to produce a love story as an addition to a film just feels forced and tired.
Morbius, like his predecessor Venom, tried to take on a supervillain character and make her the central and good character the audience would stand behind. Unlike Venom, created as a result of Spider-Man’s actions, Morbius can stand on his own, but he’s not a good person, and the film’s attempt to portray him as such is unsuccessful and feels, in fact, that Sony simply rides Spider-Man characters until viewers get tired and bring back the protagonist himself. According to rumors only, this is a version of Andrew Garfield, you choose whether to believe it).
I promised to go back to the effects in the movie. The world has criticized the effects and claimed that they are not good, but personally I thought they fit the film. They are not at the highest level, but nothing in the film was like that. It is also worth noting that they chose to present the battle scenes as cut-scenes of computer games, which added to the look and gave a moment of enjoyment.
Like any Marvel movie, here too of course one has to stay after the end of the movie to see the after-credits. Personally, I stayed for the two scenes, in which the character of Michael Keaton appears as an “eagle” from the central world of Marvel who comes after “Spider-Man – there is no way home” to the world of Morbius and Venom (which was confirmed by all sources before the film and now It happens). I will not tell you of course what happens in these scenes, but at least they give a glimmer of hope that in future movies in Sony’s universe we will win a better product.
In conclusion – if you have already chosen to go to the cinema and see the film, at least do it in the IMAX version, so that you get a proper viewing experience of the effects and sound in the film and the performance of Jared Leto. And if you’re already gone, at least you will be comforted by the fact that this is a relatively short film (104 minutes) and not two and a half to three hours as we have been used to so far.