Morbius Review

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, it’s Morbin’ Time.

This review will contain heavy spoilers. However, you should not care about spoilers. Do not watch this movie. Please for the love of all that is holy, save yourself while you still can.

Alright, I’m just gonna go ahead and say it. Morbius is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Maybe the worst. I’m not exaggerating either, it’s really that bad. A 17% on Rotten Tomatoes is very generous. This movie feels like it was hastily written in one sitting by a middle school film club. Throughout the film, there is almost zero fluidity. Things kind of just happen with no set up or explanation whatsoever.

Below is a brief synopsis of the important bits before we get into why this godforsaken movie is so bad. If you want to skip this part I guess you can, but the review will just be more confusing than it already is.

Dr. Michael Morbius was born with a unnamed blood disease. This disease makes movement difficult, significantly weakens those who have it, and shortens their life expectancy as well. While being hospitalized as a child, Morbius befriends a boy named Milo (whose birth name is Lucien). Milo had the same blood disease as Morbius. The two remain friends into adulthood. Before becoming a vampire, Morbius was a doctor who is famous for creating artificial blood (don’t even get me started on how weird a concept artificial blood is). After years of searching for a cure to his disease, Morbius conducts a weird and highly illegal experiment with the help of his otherwise useless love interest. Morbius splices his genes with the genes of a vampire bat. The experiment works, but it turns Morbius into a pseudo-vampire with an insatiable need to consume blood every six hours. Upon transforming, Morbius becomes bloodlusted, killing eight guards and relieving each of their blood. Oh yeah, and at some point Milo becomes a vampire too, becoming the film’s antagonist. Other stuff happens, but it’s boring and really stupid.

First things first: Jared Leto is a truly terrible actor. He somehow managed to make a terrible, sloppy movie even worse. His delivery of lines that were already cheesy and just straight up bad actually made me cringe multiple times. To be honest, most of the acting from the main cast isn’t good, but making fun of Jared Leto is really fun.

Morbius‘ biggest issue is that it contains several huge inconsistencies and plot holes. The most important one by far literally has to do with Morbius’ long-term survial. After becoming a vampire, Morbius chooses to consume his artificial “blue” blood instead of organic “red” blood. The artificial blood is not as effective and the interval in which Morbius needs to feed are rapidly decreasing. Unfortunately, the organic blood seems to affects the vampires’ personalities, making them more savage? Maybe? I don’t really know, this movie explains almost nothing that happens. Now here’s the meat of the problem. In the last 30 minutes of the movie, not only does the blood issue remain unsolved, it’s not even fucking mentioned. And to top it all of, Morbius himself seems to have forgotten about the issue threatening his survival every four hours.

In addition to a boring plot and terrible dialogue, the action was horrendous. When you could actually see the see what was happening, the fighting was beyond lackluster. Most of the fights were two vampires in a very dark space, smashing into each other in slow motion, with a smokey black fart filter over the whole thing. To end the final fight, Morbius summons a gazillion bats and blasts his best friend turned lunatic pseudo-vampire with a bat kamehameha. Yeah, that actually fucking happens. Then he stabs Milo with an anti-Morb serum, which kills him. That’s it. That’s the end of the movie.

This is more nitpicking than anything but it really bothers me and I have to address it. What the fuck are the (for lack of a better description) fart clouds that follow the pseudo-vampires around? Everything looks “fart cloudy” when Morbius uses sonar, but I like this effect. It looks pretty cool and it makes sense since it’s clear that Morbius is the only one seeing it. But what I don’t understand why we see it when the vampires run, jump, and fly. Also, why can they fly? There are two scenes where the movie painstakingly points out the pseudo-vampires are gliding. The first instance is with a large gust of air shooting out of a floor vent that almost blows Morbius away, and the second is the scene above where the subway train’s wind is helping Morbius fly. In the comics, pseudo-vampires do not fly, they glide. But after this, they do away with the whole gliding thing. Morbius and Milo just fucking fly out of no where multiple times.

Milo is a pretty terrible character. Almost everything about him is stupid. Even the origin of his name is stupid. In the opening of the movie, Milo takes the hospital bed next to young Morbius and introduces himself as Lucien. Morbius responds saying he called the last three children who stayed in that bed Milo, so his name is Milo too. And that’s the end of the conversation. Even the doctor who basically raises them refers to Lucien as Milo into adulthood. Why on Earth would he just accept his name being changed by someone he met seconds ago? At the end of the movie, there is a stupid scene where Milo thanks Morbius for giving him his name. I guess it was supposed to be touching, but it just made me hate the whole thing even more. There’s really no reason for this to be touching. I also want to know why Milo suddenly became a lunatic and Morbius didn’t. Was it the organic blood? The movie never explicitly says the organic blood makes pseudo-vampires bloodlusted, so I guess we’ll never know.

The movie’s end scene is weird and brings up even more unanswerable questions. The end scene includes Spider-Man: No Way Home multiversal shenanigans, with the MCU Vulture (Micheal Keaton) ending up in Morbius’ universe. What I want to know is…why the fuck did that happen? I know that Morbius was originally a Spider-Man villain, but that’s simply not how the No Way Home spell works. Morbius is in the same universe as the Venom movies, which is a distinctly different universe than the MCU. As a matter of fact, Eddie Brock and Venom were briefly brought out of their universe because of the spell. In No Way Home, Spider-Man characters from older renditions were brought to the MCU. Why the hell would an MCU villain be chucked out of their universe, and into Morbius’? Spider-Man doesn’t even fucking exist there. It just makes no sense. This is whole movie is one long “somehow, Palpatine returned” ass-pull. And even though he has absolutely no way of knowing this, Vulture tells Morbius the reason he’s in another universe is Spider-Man. I don’t even know at this point. It seems like Sony and Marvel are attempting to set up a Sinister Six, but this is a very sloppy way of doing it.

In case you’re out of the loop, memes ironically calling Morbius the best movie ever made have taken over the internet. As a result, Sony rereleased Morbius in theaters, and only made $300,000 that weekend. That translates to about $289 per theater. This was a VERY predictable turn of events, but hilarious nonetheless. The memes are all great, but the movie itself is so bad it’s not even funny.

In conclusion, Morbius is breathtakingly terrible and made me regret existence. The review you just read was emotionally written in a storm of blinding rage and unbearable despair, and is still vastly more coherent than the actual movie. There are several other really bad things about the film, but I really don’t want to devote more brain power to thinking about Morbius. I can talk about how bad Morbius is for longer than it’s runtime. As long as this movie exists, sleep will evade me…

Verdict:

Do not watch this movie.

Score: 1/10

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments below!

Disclaimer: We do not own any of these images or clips. Sony Entertainment and Colombia Pictures own all of them.