Bad blood
If you, like me, are of the opinion that there's nothing more enervating to watch in 2020s American filmmaking than a strictly formulaic comic book movie, Morbius has a surprise for you. It manages to do something that I'm a bit surprised it's possible for a film made for this much money and with this much of a studio's stubborn insistence on building a god-damned shared cinematic universe riding on it: it fucks up the fundamentals. It makes one simply desperate to watch a solid, pointedly uninspired bit of formulaic storytelling; at least that can be boring enough to be relaxing. Morbius is just clumsy enough that it's hard to ignore it, and so it keeps itching, that desire to connect all of its fragments of narrative where the filmmakers themselves have singularly failed to do so. It's bad enough that you can't ignore it - and, even so, not bad enough to be delightfully disastrous. It's just plain miserable to sit through, offering almost nothing pleasurable either ironically or unironically, unless like me you take pleasure in knowing that Jared Harris is getting blockbuster-sized paychecks.
And, the credits are really cool. Both at the beginning, where a series of magenta and blue chevrons sweep down the screen, slowly creating the massive shape of the letter "M", and at the end, where they're a series of spinning, spirograph-like circular designs that spin and recede into themselves. They create a vortex of blue and magenta, tunneling into space and creating a really lovely feeling of plunging into pure graphic design; at one point, the name "Matt Smith" appears over them, and for a couple of seconds you can make-believe that it's the credits to some future Doctor Who special.
One looks for any opportunity to make-believe that one isn't watching Morbius, which is the most unendurable slog that any film based on a Marvel or DC comic book character has been in several years - the infamous 2015 Fant4stic is an insurmountable wall of shattering mediocrity, but before that, I think you have to get all the way to the 2000s to find a major comic book movie that's just flat-out as shitty as Morbius. And it starts right from the top: the film opens with Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), suffering from a blood disease that has left his legs all but useless, hobbles his way to a cave mouth in South America, where he strikes a dramatic pose and lets vampire bats swarm all around him. Everything about this scene is baffling, speeding through Michael's first appearance and explaining absolutely nothing at all, and it's very clear that it's just going to be the latest example of the ongoing scourge of modern American filmmaking the "opening scene that takes place in the middle of the story". And this is confirmed by the cut directly to 25 Years Earlier, where young Michael (Charlie Shotwell) is wasting away in a children's blood hospital in Greece, when the bed next to him is taken by another boy with the same ailment named Lucian (Joseph Esson), though Michael pointlessly insists on calling him "Milo".
And here's where the real just horrendous storytelling comes in, since as it turns out, that's the last we hear of that cave. When we jump ahead to the modern day, we're apparently already past that point, since Michael now has a giant science cylinder full of bats in his lab. But before we see that, we go to Stockholm, and the presentation of a Nobel Prize to Michael for his revolutionary achievements in creating synthetic blood. His name is called, he rustles in his seat, and then we cut to his lonely lab, which only houses himself and Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), who teasingly but with a serious edge censures him for embarrassing the Nobel committee by refusing the accept the award.
We are merely minutes into the film, and I, for one, already felt like I was trying to watch the movie while blackout drunk. Questions that will never have answers abound: why is the children's hospital in Greece? Why did Michael turn down the Nobel Prize? Why, in planning to turn it down, did he bother traveling all the way to Stockholm to do so? Who the hell is Lucian, other than "some exorbitantly rich Brit?" Why does Lucian decide to commit to "Milo" for the rest of the movie? Couldn't he have just been named Milo from the start? If Michael can win Nobel Prizes and have the proud patronage of an exorbitantly rich Brit, why does his lab feel so secretive and shady? What in the hell was the point of showing us the South America scene?
What, really, is the point of showing any of this? The film could have pretty easily started right in with Michael and Martine putting vampire bat DNA into a mouse, and skip over literally everything I have thus far told you about, though I suppose the material with him and Milo as children would still need to show up in flashbacks or something. To be fair to Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless, who ended up with the screenwriting credit at the end of what feels like it must have surely been a long and dreary stay in Development Hell, I don't think this is necessarily their fault. Morbius feels very much like a film that was lost in the editing room, and that's despite having legendary editor Pietro Scalia cutting it; whether this was before or after it spent nearly two years waiting out the pandemic to finally hit theaters, I couldn't possibly say. Nor can any of us know what real or perceived problem in the footage they were trying to solve by assembling the film this way (running time, is my guess: at 104 minutes, Morbius is a slender reed of a film by modern superhero movie standards, and while I appreciate that, it's unmistakably rushed). But it has clearly been tinkered with, not at all to its advantage, and the opening act in particular is a borderline-unwatchable travesty of exposition, presenting little shards and scraps and stitching them together with nothing whatsoever other than our vague knowledge that we're watching the kind of film that will ultimately end with Michael becoming a vampire super-anti-hero, after he injects himself with bat DNA.
Which is exactly what happens, and then grown-up Milo (Matt Smith) does the same thing, though I'm not at all sure that the movie actually leaves a spot for him to do so, and so ultimately the film becomes a Bad Vampire versus Morally Ambiguous Vampire slugfest. Other than its waves of CGI - Leto and Smith morph into vampires partway very often, and it's a cool effect; they also leave streamers of smeary colored air when they move very fast, which is stupid, distracting, and ugly effect - Morbius could very easily have been a 1990s comic book movie, with its achingly long origin story, its small scale (I'm not sure that the film clarifies its stakes, but basically it's that Michael would feel bad about letting Milo terrorise New York as a vampire), and its flat urban setting. And I do admire how compact it is; superhero movies getting up their own ass with "the fate is the world/galaxy/reality" has been a tiresome development over the last decade, almost as much as the bloated and bloating running times have been. This snug little "what if Darkman was a vampire?" number, with its tidy, narrow world (the film basically only has six characters we need to care about, seven if you count the sympathetic nurse who dies in the one scene of this vampire movie that meaningfully resembles horror cinema), is a nice corrective. On paper. In practice, it's so confusingly laid out in the beginning that's hard to tell when the story actually begins, and even once it stumbles past the wasteland of its opening act, it's still awfully hard to care. Leto and Smith are both completely hampered by the film's muted tone: I don't know if director Daniel Espinosa enforced that on their performances, though I get the impression that Leto, at least, came up with it on his own, and Smith was presumably just stuck with it at that point. And so neither Michael nor Milo makes any real impression on us; it's just one guy who is chagrined to be a bloodthirsty vampire and one guy who isn't, and since even the first guy has done absolutely nothing to endear himself to us, it's hard to care. Of those six or seven humans, the only one who gets anything resembling a good performance is Dr. Nicholas, the Jared Harris character, and that's mostly just because Harris has at this point in his career arrived at the point where he cannot stop himself from radiating avuncular screen presence.
Otherwise, it's a completely empty movie, which in its very best moments rises up to the level of perfunctory and bland. At its worst moments, of which there are considerably more, it is either confusing, or trite, or underlit, or marred with smeary, ugly CGI, or face-planting on two of the absolute worst world-building post-credits scenes in the history of the genre, as it tries to force into existence something called the Sony's Spider-Man Universe (a name whose inarticulate hideousness makes it an exemplar of the dire place Hollywood filmmaking has crashed into as the 2020s shape up to be even worse than the 2010s were for popcorn movies). At its very worst, it is actually, literally incoherent and unwatchable. So hooray, it's a messy boondoggle instead of lifeless, sterile proficiency, but I much prefer my boondoggles to be lively, and not the living corpse this movie presents.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And, the credits are really cool. Both at the beginning, where a series of magenta and blue chevrons sweep down the screen, slowly creating the massive shape of the letter "M", and at the end, where they're a series of spinning, spirograph-like circular designs that spin and recede into themselves. They create a vortex of blue and magenta, tunneling into space and creating a really lovely feeling of plunging into pure graphic design; at one point, the name "Matt Smith" appears over them, and for a couple of seconds you can make-believe that it's the credits to some future Doctor Who special.
One looks for any opportunity to make-believe that one isn't watching Morbius, which is the most unendurable slog that any film based on a Marvel or DC comic book character has been in several years - the infamous 2015 Fant4stic is an insurmountable wall of shattering mediocrity, but before that, I think you have to get all the way to the 2000s to find a major comic book movie that's just flat-out as shitty as Morbius. And it starts right from the top: the film opens with Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), suffering from a blood disease that has left his legs all but useless, hobbles his way to a cave mouth in South America, where he strikes a dramatic pose and lets vampire bats swarm all around him. Everything about this scene is baffling, speeding through Michael's first appearance and explaining absolutely nothing at all, and it's very clear that it's just going to be the latest example of the ongoing scourge of modern American filmmaking the "opening scene that takes place in the middle of the story". And this is confirmed by the cut directly to 25 Years Earlier, where young Michael (Charlie Shotwell) is wasting away in a children's blood hospital in Greece, when the bed next to him is taken by another boy with the same ailment named Lucian (Joseph Esson), though Michael pointlessly insists on calling him "Milo".
And here's where the real just horrendous storytelling comes in, since as it turns out, that's the last we hear of that cave. When we jump ahead to the modern day, we're apparently already past that point, since Michael now has a giant science cylinder full of bats in his lab. But before we see that, we go to Stockholm, and the presentation of a Nobel Prize to Michael for his revolutionary achievements in creating synthetic blood. His name is called, he rustles in his seat, and then we cut to his lonely lab, which only houses himself and Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), who teasingly but with a serious edge censures him for embarrassing the Nobel committee by refusing the accept the award.
We are merely minutes into the film, and I, for one, already felt like I was trying to watch the movie while blackout drunk. Questions that will never have answers abound: why is the children's hospital in Greece? Why did Michael turn down the Nobel Prize? Why, in planning to turn it down, did he bother traveling all the way to Stockholm to do so? Who the hell is Lucian, other than "some exorbitantly rich Brit?" Why does Lucian decide to commit to "Milo" for the rest of the movie? Couldn't he have just been named Milo from the start? If Michael can win Nobel Prizes and have the proud patronage of an exorbitantly rich Brit, why does his lab feel so secretive and shady? What in the hell was the point of showing us the South America scene?
What, really, is the point of showing any of this? The film could have pretty easily started right in with Michael and Martine putting vampire bat DNA into a mouse, and skip over literally everything I have thus far told you about, though I suppose the material with him and Milo as children would still need to show up in flashbacks or something. To be fair to Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless, who ended up with the screenwriting credit at the end of what feels like it must have surely been a long and dreary stay in Development Hell, I don't think this is necessarily their fault. Morbius feels very much like a film that was lost in the editing room, and that's despite having legendary editor Pietro Scalia cutting it; whether this was before or after it spent nearly two years waiting out the pandemic to finally hit theaters, I couldn't possibly say. Nor can any of us know what real or perceived problem in the footage they were trying to solve by assembling the film this way (running time, is my guess: at 104 minutes, Morbius is a slender reed of a film by modern superhero movie standards, and while I appreciate that, it's unmistakably rushed). But it has clearly been tinkered with, not at all to its advantage, and the opening act in particular is a borderline-unwatchable travesty of exposition, presenting little shards and scraps and stitching them together with nothing whatsoever other than our vague knowledge that we're watching the kind of film that will ultimately end with Michael becoming a vampire super-anti-hero, after he injects himself with bat DNA.
Which is exactly what happens, and then grown-up Milo (Matt Smith) does the same thing, though I'm not at all sure that the movie actually leaves a spot for him to do so, and so ultimately the film becomes a Bad Vampire versus Morally Ambiguous Vampire slugfest. Other than its waves of CGI - Leto and Smith morph into vampires partway very often, and it's a cool effect; they also leave streamers of smeary colored air when they move very fast, which is stupid, distracting, and ugly effect - Morbius could very easily have been a 1990s comic book movie, with its achingly long origin story, its small scale (I'm not sure that the film clarifies its stakes, but basically it's that Michael would feel bad about letting Milo terrorise New York as a vampire), and its flat urban setting. And I do admire how compact it is; superhero movies getting up their own ass with "the fate is the world/galaxy/reality" has been a tiresome development over the last decade, almost as much as the bloated and bloating running times have been. This snug little "what if Darkman was a vampire?" number, with its tidy, narrow world (the film basically only has six characters we need to care about, seven if you count the sympathetic nurse who dies in the one scene of this vampire movie that meaningfully resembles horror cinema), is a nice corrective. On paper. In practice, it's so confusingly laid out in the beginning that's hard to tell when the story actually begins, and even once it stumbles past the wasteland of its opening act, it's still awfully hard to care. Leto and Smith are both completely hampered by the film's muted tone: I don't know if director Daniel Espinosa enforced that on their performances, though I get the impression that Leto, at least, came up with it on his own, and Smith was presumably just stuck with it at that point. And so neither Michael nor Milo makes any real impression on us; it's just one guy who is chagrined to be a bloodthirsty vampire and one guy who isn't, and since even the first guy has done absolutely nothing to endear himself to us, it's hard to care. Of those six or seven humans, the only one who gets anything resembling a good performance is Dr. Nicholas, the Jared Harris character, and that's mostly just because Harris has at this point in his career arrived at the point where he cannot stop himself from radiating avuncular screen presence.
Otherwise, it's a completely empty movie, which in its very best moments rises up to the level of perfunctory and bland. At its worst moments, of which there are considerably more, it is either confusing, or trite, or underlit, or marred with smeary, ugly CGI, or face-planting on two of the absolute worst world-building post-credits scenes in the history of the genre, as it tries to force into existence something called the Sony's Spider-Man Universe (a name whose inarticulate hideousness makes it an exemplar of the dire place Hollywood filmmaking has crashed into as the 2020s shape up to be even worse than the 2010s were for popcorn movies). At its very worst, it is actually, literally incoherent and unwatchable. So hooray, it's a messy boondoggle instead of lifeless, sterile proficiency, but I much prefer my boondoggles to be lively, and not the living corpse this movie presents.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
