Movie Review: Morbius
Last day of freedom, guys. Wish me luck.
Yep, with ninth grade starting literally tomorrow, I’m hoping to get this article out as soon as possible, which means today. It means today.
Edit: I said this on the day I started this article. Last week. On the 2nd of April. And today is the 10th. It’s been a whole week. Apologies.
So, hello! It’s Agastya, back with another review, cause what else do I even do these days? Today, we shall review the new Marvel movie, Morbius. Coincidentally, the first movie I watched on my own in theatres, because both my parents tapped out before I even suggested watching it. Well then.
Dr Michael Morbius (played by Jared Leto), suffers from a deadly disease, which leaves part of his DNA incomplete, disabling him from walking properly. In the hospital he is in (in his childhood), he quickly makes friends with Lucien, who he renames Milo, a boy suffering from the same rare blood disease.
The movie then jumps 25 years ahead, where Morbius is working in Horizon Labs in New York, after having publicly denied a Nobel Prize regarding his work with artificial blood. His colleague and friend, Martine Bancroft, discovers that he has trapped hundreds of Costa Rican bats, to attempt and combine bat DNA with his own, to cure his affliction. And here I was, thinking the best thing out of the country was the coffee. And where he stands on animal trafficking laws is beyond me, but the madness of scientists and the logic of Marvel is not something I have the ability to question.
He attempts the experiment upon himself, to (obviously) disastrous effects. He gains the ability to walk, and his body is strengthened, with no more gaps in his DNA, but the filler bat genes turn him into a living, whole vampire. Yeah. He now hangs off the ceiling, has fangs, and possesses a face that curdles milk. Oh, and he needs to drink blood. Or he goes mad.
Spoiler time!
His friend, Milo, takes the serum of bat DNA as well, and goes through the same side effects as Morbius. With one substantial difference.
Milo, who has been living under the same conditions as Michael for most of his life, chooses what I would like to call the other side of his coin. Milo becomes what people consider to be a villain, the threat of death no longer hanging over his head, living freely. He attacks people, and drinks their blood, whereas Morbius, till this point, was surviving by drinking his invention of artificial blood.
Upon getting to know this, Morbius works with Bancroft to perfect another serum, one that nearly kills humans, but is absolutely lethal to bats. So basically, a murder serum.
Milo, in an attempt to get Morbius to embrace his ‘true nature’, attacks Bancroft, and takes her to a rooftop in the city, and nearly kills her. By the time Morbius gets there, she is almost dead, and overtaken with grief, he finally drinks her blood. He then attacks Milo, and they fight their way into the sewers, where with the cry of grief, he summons hundreds of thousands of bats, who manage to distract and hold on Milo long enough for Morbius to get close and stab his friend with the serum. And people cry when they get vaccines.
Morbius flies off into the night with his swarm of bats, and the movie ends with Bancroft getting revived with new bat DNA.
Spoiler’s over, get back here.
Now for my review.
The best part of the movie will easily be the special effects, with brilliant editing and acting. The problems begin soon, with the plot not being up to Marvel’s usual mark, and despite good editing, the movie being very slow. The movie was unevenly spread, with too much thrust over the first half and not enough over the second.
Another problem with the movie, and I’d like to thank Collider’s article for helping me express it (I’ll be giving the link at the bottom), is that the classic friends-to-enemies trope didn’t work well at all. It needed a proper establishment to Milo and Michael’s friendship, which was not the case at all. Perhaps the only saving factor would be the effort put into the roles by both Jared Leto and Matt Smith.
Overall, the movie would end up below the usual standard that Marvel has come to establish, despite any redemption I may have mentioned. Even the mid-credits and post-credits scene, which had been added in to create more suspense for more movies, made little to no sense, and felt way too forced.
In typical fashion, it seems that this will not be the last time we’ll be seeing Morbius, and we can hope that his future roles will be better than this one.
Well, that’s all for today from me! Hope you enjoyed!
Edit: here’s that Collider review I was talking about, huge shoutout to the author, you really helped, thank you so much:
