I thought all of the bad reviews would suck the life out my enjoyment of this movie, and they nearly did. But, this movie is okay. Think of Wonder Woman 1984 but with the reverse problem of pacing. This movie moves as fast and blurry as Morbius himself at times, and scenes seem to be missing that would have added a little useful context.
For context, Gil Kane’s sinister rendering of Morbius in his Amazing Spider-Man debut issues really stuck with me. He was pretty cool looking, powerful, sinewy, dangerous — and he bit people and sucked their blood to sustain himself. Pretty cinematic stuff, right? But as vampire movies began to fade out with the dawn of the new century, I am guessing most people never gave a Michael Morbius movie much thought at all.
And then along came Sony Pictures Entertainment’s lust for cashing in on Marvel Studio’s huge success with their superhero movies.
This is actually a pretty easy movie to talk about without revealing any spoilers. There’s really only four characters and two homicide detectives. Two of them (Jared Leto as Michael Morbius and Matt Smith as “Milo”) are childhood friends who become pitted against one another as adults. Adria Arjona as Martine Bancroft is the fellow medical researcher who becomes the damsel in distress for a quick minute. Finally, Jared Harris as Dr. Nicholas is the well-intentioned older fellow who cares about both boys and what they are going through now as adults with a shared, heretofore-fatal, medical malady.
There are no real surprises at all in how things play out. The character motivations are simple and things make sense within the context of this world (except for the wacky extra scenes as the movie ends). You’ll have to hold your nose with regards to a couple of the science elements but honestly, that part wasn’t as bad as I expected.
The special effects are solid, the sound design is good but the soundtrack is pretty bland and the score is so-so. The color is intentionally washed-out with filters and many scenes are in low-light.
After the movie ends there are a couple of tacked-on scenes suggesting strongly Sony wants to leverage their distribution ownership of the Spider-Man characters and use Michael Morbius as a building block to bigger things. But the critical response to this movie will be very poor, and that might make casual movie fans pass on seeing this in theaters.
I’ll give it this: it might be the first time I’ve heard “artificial bladder” in a movie.
