Morbius

In a time when movies based on comic books are routinely some of the better blockbusters to come out of Hollywood, Morbius is a sad throwback to an earlier time, when the Studios didn't know what to do with all these costumed weirdos.  It's an aggressively bland film, littered with characters who have no motivation or consequence, and endless special effects sequences that are so overly digital they become numbing.

We know that humans cannot do the things that this movie requires its hero and villain (both humans who have become vampires) to do.  They cannot fly, dodge bullets in slo-mo like Neo in The Matrix, or break down walls like the Kool-Aid Man.  And so, the challenge for a film like this is to make these images believable, and make it look like the actors are actually performing them.  Remember the famous tagline, "You Will Believe a Man Can Fly", from Superman?   That was a simpler time, and a much better movie.  Here, whenever Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), or his best friend-turned nemesis Milo (Matt Smith), take to the skies or battle one another in fierce bursts that can barely be registered by the naked eye, we know the whole time that nothing we are seeing is actually there.  Not the actors, not the set, and not the various bursts of energy exploding around them.   

I've grown increasingly weary of movies that simply throw non-stop digital effects up on the screen.  Why hire actors if everything's just going to turn into a cartoon once the fists start flying?  Why not just make it animated to begin with?  Why pay the big bucks for Jared Leto to be your leading man, when you're not going to have him perform any stunts whatsoever?  Do action movies like this even need to hire stunt people?  I find myself asking these questions more often as blockbusters go on.  I'm not proud of that fact.  I want to be swept away by the images, and the illusion that the impossible is happening in front of me.  Instead, every time the action started to heat up, all I could think of was some effects guy sitting in a chair with his laptop, cranking out the next sequence.

If you're not going to thrill us with action, I only ask that you give us some interesting or quirky characters.  Morbius fails here, as well.  When we first meet the good Dr. Morbius, he is apparently a genius in the field of medicine, though I have to wonder, as at one point in the film, he refers to his work as "Science-y stuff". (Might be technical jargon for all I know.) The movie rushes through his origin story, almost as if the screenwriters were as eager to get through with it as I was.  Morbius and Milo are childhood best friends with a rare blood disease that is unnamed, but has crippled them their whole lives.  He wants to change that, doing experiments with a certain kind of bat that he thinks could hold a cure.  He tests it on himself, and is instantly transformed into a vampire who is healthy and has incredible strength and skill, but has to feed on blood in order to survive.

Luckily, Morbius' main contribution to science has been to create synthetic blood, so he decides to feast on that in order to keep the blood-lusting beast at bay.  Milo, on the other hand, has no qualms with feeding upon people, and becomes an overgrown bully after he undergoes the experiment as well and becomes a vampire like Morbius.  So, the battle here is basically the hero thinks this whole thing is a curse, while the villain thinks it's cool to be a vampire.  In the grand scheme of comic book plots that are usually filled with Earth-shattering battles and stakes, you have to admit that's fairly lame.  There's a woman in the middle of it all, Morbius' assistant Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona).  I think she's supposed to be the Doctor's love interest, though they share no meaningful scenes or dialogue, so I honestly could be wrong.

Morbius offers no window into these characters, and no plot threads to grasp onto, until it eventually dissolves into a shapeless mass of special effects that are being thrown up on the screen endlessly.  This movie bored me to tears, as it has no desire to show us anything we haven't seen before, or give us some unique characters or lines of dialogue that could generate interest.  It simply wants to bombard the senses, while occasionally giving one of its actors a line or a scene that hints at emotion rather than displaying it.  By the time the special effects dominated, and I knew they meant nothing, I almost wanted to walk out.  Life is too short for movies that deaden the imagination such as this.

Not even the cameo during the mid-credits by an actor who is always a welcome sight to me could lift my spirits after this leaden experience.  Say you crave thrills, or adventure, or fun.  This movie can't supply these simple requests.  Is this even a movie, or is it just a tech demo disguised as one?  I actually have to wonder.

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