Don’t Watch Morbius: a Morbius Review

Contains Spoilers

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Kirstin Hayes, Perspectives Editor '22

I am not sure where to begin with this movie. To start off I showed up to the theater around 10-15 minutes late, so I can’t speak much to what happened in that time, but I can say that missing it was probably the best 10-15 minutes of the entire movie. I went into the film not expecting much other than expecting it to be awful, and on that front, it did not disappoint at all. There were so many aspects of this movie that felt extraneous, useless, or just overall confusing. So, I’ve decided to organize my thoughts as coherently as possible, but I’ll warn you preemptively I really did not enjoy it.

When you look at Morbius from a step back, there were really only three characters, and you know surprisingly little about each of them. Could this be due to me missing the first 10 minutes of the movie? The world may never know. Take our main character Michael Morbius for example, I’ve heard that in the couple of minutes that I missed at the beginning, we learn a bit of his childhood spent in a hospital/school for other children who share the same blood disease as him, but that’s about it. Where are his parents? How did he end up in there? Does he have a personality?

On the topic of personality, we learn next to nothing about any the character’s personalities. My main question for the duration of the film was why did Milo immediately turn evil once he was given his bat/vampire-esque powers? From my knowledge of vampire-lore (mostly from Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight) gaining inhuman abilities and the primal need to consume blood does not alter your brain chemistry; you don’t usually go out and kill strangers just for the fun of it. If we had perhaps gotten a little bit more insight to Milo’s character, maybe it would have made more sense why he became the villain. Early on it only seemed like Milo wanted the ability to live beyond the constraints of his blood disease and without the fear of his impending death, yet once he’s given this, he turns murderous. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

And finally, the love interest that no one asked for, Dr. Martine Bancroft. Morbius did the worst by her character. Starting from the scene where Morbius turns into the “living vampire,” and she begs him to stop because this isn’t him. This whole exchange seemed as if it was plucked straight from videos that everyone has seen: “Jason, this isn’t you. Jason, look at me we talked about this.” Unfortunately, the story surrounding her character only seems to get worse from here, she’s rendered incapacitated during the fight between Morbius and the mercenaries and we don’t see her for a long stretch of time, until they need her for the awkward and forced romantic relationship created between Dr. Bancroft and Michael Morbius. I said the same thing when Rachel Dawes was introduced in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy and I’ll say it now: a romantic interest is not integral to the plot of every superhero movie. There was truly no need for the strange kiss shared between Bancroft and Morbius, and there was certainly no need to resurrect her at the very end of the movie.

I think the end of the film was probably the best part of the entire thing. It was finally over, but they couldn’t help but to torture audiences one last time with what seemed to be the promise of the return of an extremely unlikeable character. This unlikeable character being Michael Morbius himself. The post credit scenes were confusing, which isn’t new for Marvel or Sony, but it raised the question that seemed to be present for the whole movie—why? Why bring back the least interesting Spiderman villain? Where did he get the suit from in this new universe? So many questions, yet so few answers. Ultimately, I don’t have anything specific that I think would have made this film better, other than it just simply not being made. And now I will end this review as abruptly as Morbius ended.