After I watched Venom on the big screen in 2018, I never thought I’d see a film in cinemas that’s even worse, but my friend wanted to do an April fool’s thing, and the joke was Morbius.
I haven’t seen a film so lacking in self-inspiration for a long time. It is easily the worst film of the superhero genre since Josh Trank’s F4ntastic. It’s not even the kind of bad you laugh at, but the fact that it’s so bad and uninspired is definitely a reason for laughing your guts out.
Every character speaks like the average generalization of the archetype they’re representing, and even the most basic lines are delivered as some sort of a revelation. It never stops narrowly spoonfeeding what’s happening. It’s almost as if it was written by a generic bot that was forced to watch all the bad-to-mid early 2000s superhero films. All the members of a particular social role talk like how you’d expect them to, barely having an identity of their own. But the worst of all is the film’s antagonist Milo. While every other character is written overly stereotypically, to call Milo inconsistent would simply be an understatement. He starts off as the protagonist’s rather reserved childhood friend. Both of them are disabled and suffer from a fatal condition, but Milo is the one who gets bullied every now and then. Morbius devotes his entire life to finding a cure, with Milo being one of his main motivations. Decades later, a cure comes forth, and instead of testing it on Milo, who’s closer to death, Morbius uses it on himself. Upon the catastrophic results, which turn him into a bloodsucking vampire, Morbius must prevent his DYING friend from getting the cure, with Morbius never implying to find an alternative. And that's all there is to their conflict. Milo receives no character development besides beating up a bully in childhood. You'd think Harry Osborne's obsession with being cured in Amazing Spider-man 2 was stupid, but at least that was emphasised to an extent, even if unsubtly. His only motivation is to embrace his identity, which due to having none, is entirely that of being a vampire, and the third act has him entirely doing worse vampire things than Morbius himself. The dilemma is never explored, and all that happens on the surface is what the film’s hypothetical soul comprises. Other characters include a love interest who’s here for the sake of being a love interest and two comic-relief cops who never achieve comedy.
Daniel Espinosa’s ‘Life’ was a painfully average film too, but the direction here lacks any form of nuance. Besides feeling like the average early 2000s comic-book disaster, the film also aims high at times by following the book of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films in terms of style. Yet the derivation is for style and style alone, and never finds relevance with the substance itself. Not only does one of the leitmotifs in Morbius sound like a ripoff of Hans Zimmer's Batman theme, but the film also decides to soullessly replicate some of The Dark Knight's visual storytelling schemes like moving shots of the city's skyscrapers. It did make sense for The Dark Knight because it was a political thriller where the impact on and of the city was a major plot point, and these shots reflected its state. Morbius only uses them for style and never makes them relevant. In fact, some shots are repeated over and over. It never manages to emphasise or evoke feelings and themes through its visuals. You regularly see shots of bats inside a lab chamber with the Zimmer-Batman-like theme playing in the background, but it all never adds to the narrative.
Besides that, the action and editing are extremely messy and lacking in character. The action feels is reminiscent of mid-2000s games’ obsession with slow-motion button prompts and quick-time events, and the editing is extremely inconsistent. In fact, there’s one scene where Morbius wakes up from his first big vampire break and looks at his own surveillance footage, and it’s so badly edited that it feels like there’s a Morbius clone at the site. Leto’s known for his overacting antics, but here, he thankfully plays an introverted character, albeit extremely robotically. You never connect with his struggle, unless you think and summarise what’s happening with him, which is not what films or art forms are about. Matt Smith tries adding life to his extremely inconsistent character but never manages to overcome the stupidity of the film itself.
And though it was already a bad enough film, the filmmakers somehow felt the need to include a completely laughable and out-of-place scene of Milo dancing to a pretty goofy song. Because how else would they depict a perfectly normal guy who punched bullies back in childhood turning into a piece of shit in general? The Riddler’s obsession with Ave Maria in The Batman has a lot to do with his backstory and even Peter Parker’s Drive that Funky Soul moment in Spider-Man 3 was well-built. This, on the other end, is one of the many examples of Milo’s inconsistencies, as well as the film’s lack of creative direction. Another laughable bit is the fact that right after the hero’s supposedly badass introduction, the film uses a Tom and Jerry-styled transition with an expanding or shrinking circle (I don’t specifically remember). To say that Morbius was born from a set of ideas or an idea altogether is criminal.
It’s interesting how the last 30-ish days have given us one of the best and one of the worst superhero films. Morbius is not even the ‘The Room’ kind of bad. When you laugh at The Room, you laugh at its content, but with Morbius, most of your laughter directs itself towards how terrible and uninspired it is, and that, I’m afraid, would only be a one-time thing. If anything, Morbius is a reflection of the turn this genre has been taking, and for not just the last few years. MCU films may not be extremely authentic, but most of them are decently made, even if overrated. The problem arises when you only derive the formula but fail to find the decency, which is what makes a film Morbius.
Damn Pencil you write... I guess you got a point
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