Morbius (2022)
The line between hero and villain will be broken.
We know vampires. We know plenty of types and attempts of vampires. We know Spider man. We know all sorts of things - but the one thing we will never know is why out of nowhere someone wanted to make a movie centered on the comic character Morbius that most of us non-comic types probably know from Spider-man adjacent stuff like video games and cartoons. Anyways, people crapped all over this movie and turned it into a meme, so I expect it to be at worst mediocre going off past experiences - let’s check it out. Keep you blood in your veins and don’t go mixing with bat DNA - tonight we watch Morbius.
The plot is a classic science gone wrong situation. We’ve got a couple kids growing up with a blood disease forming a great friendship. One of the two goes one to be a great scientist trying to find a cure for what ails them, whilst the other tends to fund his experiments. When he comes to the decision that vampire bats are the best angle to pursue, the scientist discovers what every movie scientist does - just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. After splicing himself with some vampire bat DNA, the good doctor becomes a bit blood-hungry. Of course, now he has to try and figure out what’s going on, how to fix it, and how to break it to his friend who isn’t so keen on not getting some super-juice that lets him walk like he’s normal.
The actors do a fine job. Is there any super-crazy home run performances? No. Is anyone phoning it in? Not as far as it feels - although a few characters certainly feel like the character itself is a little phoned in (but in an intentional sort of way). Like, there’s plenty of room for serious acting, but they take the time to make sure they have moments or characters based in humor as well. Not as many people will be find their funny bone getting struck by it, but it’s not really so much the actors parts as much as the writing’s fault in this case. Probably helps that the main two characters are folks with some chops in the acting circuit.
The characters themselves are about as advanced as you would expect from a comic movie character that hasn’t had 12 movies to set them up. You have a generally good guy scientist whose actually a doctor that I keep calling a scientist because all the science stuff he keeps doing who every step of the way has great intentions and feels overly bad when things go wrong. You have a villain who gets to be the flip side of this, being rotten and jaded given his past experiences and abusing power when he gets it because of it, and you get comic detectives. Yes, we have a female lead who does a good job acting, but her character largely feels wasted outside the generic movie romance character if I’m to be completely blunt with you.
A budding bromance.
I’d argue that nothing I’ve spoken about yet is worse than mediocre. I think where some of the troubles start is the audio department. For the most part, everything is good - I mean, yes, as is always the case with me and music I forget it’s existence as soon as the movie is over. Still, it’s there and it works fine. What I’m specifically referring to here is that occasionally some of the audio sounds like it definitely was recorded after the fact and just added on, as though someone thought it was too silent and something had to be said to fill the dead air. Other times, something will be hard to hear - either from an enhanced level of grumble to make it spooky, or just because it’s too quiet for you to hear. I’m not entirely sure if it’s intentional or not if i’m being honest, and it’s not frequent enough to really drive me nuts, but still it is there.
The effects is probably where most would complain I think - which again I should lead with “if they weren’t me.” I’ve seen bad effects. Heck, I grew up in an age where games were just a bunch of cruddy little square lights on the screen and sometimes janky clay figures where shot by shot animated across a screen so my tolerance for what’s bad is far sturdier than some folks. I will give it up though - some of the scenes do seem like something you would have gotten on a game console. A newer one, mind you - we are still talking polygons not pixels - but perhaps not exactly breaking out of the uncanny valley either. I really enjoy the whispy smoke effect that permeates every vampire action - but I also admit it does make a lot of the scenes with them in it way more busy than it really needs to be, especially in the latter final act battle which combines all the whisps with the darkness and constant movement. It does some fun bullet-time style slow downs, and the varying levels of vamp-out face features is relatively nice. That said, I have never been a fan of the more bat-like appearance of the character Morbius, even before the movie, so I much prefer when the face is less intense in the effects and a more contained almost prosthetic look - which I’m also not entirely convinced they didn’t do sometimes even though you can notice a lot of CG use in there.
I think the biggest crime the movie has is being mediocre. It’s another origin story - something that almost always kills the audience approval rate, even on characters who a ton of folks don’t know. I think it might stem from so many being something that so much media has used and emulated that people just get sick and more critical of origin stories than anything else. The fact that this one exists in a time when Marvel keeps pumping out movies that the masses constantly put bank into certainly didn’t help it’s chances running at the front of the pack. Admittedly it is a bit more horror-oriented than a lot of comic movies, but it also still doesn’t really do enough to set it apart from other things out there that I can see it being something that really excelled in even the best release window.
Slow motion.
Morbius is a mediocre movie, but that’s not a bad thing. I don’t know that I think it was worth two end credit sequences, but all in all it’s certianly not something that you’d regret watching in so much as you might just forget you watched it. It’s got some good actors doing some decent stuff with a rather familiar idea in a comic book presentation, and it has some neat effects getting used. It won’t excel at any real moment to blow your mind, but It’s more than enough to entertain for the amount of time it’s on screen.