After years of delays and reshoots, Sony’s “Morbius” was released in theaters on April 1. With this film, it’s clear that Sony is only doing these movies for whichever characters they can. “Morbius” feels like a studio completing a checklist rather than telling a story they actually care about.
The film follows scientist Michael Morbius, played by Jared Leto, as he accidentally turns himself into a deadly vampire after trying to cure his fatal rare blood disease. With the help of fellow scientist Martine Bancroft, played by Adria Torres, Morbius has to decide if living as a vampire is worth causing the death of those around him.
The pacing of the movie often felt jarring, and many concepts flew by without getting time to develop. Without spoiling too much, Morbius has a moral dilemma throughout the movie that only partially gets addressed by the end. The way I saw it, he just kind of gets over it. Also, Morbius and Bancroft aren’t romantically together, until they suddenly are in one scene. These things just happen, and the audience is automatically expected to be invested.
The action scenes in the movie also had questionable choices that kept pulling me out. At least half a dozen times, a second or two of slow motion was used during fast-paced action. Each time it happened, it reminded me of a scene from the film “Kung Fu Panda.” In the climax of that movie, Po pushes Tai Lung towards a building. As Tai Lung quickly tumbles on the floor, the scene is interjected with several slow motion shots, each of them showing Tai Lung’s silly expressions. When “Morbius” did it for dramatic effect, I only found it funny in the same way I did “Kung Fu Panda,” except it clearly wasn’t supposed to be.
Other scenes don’t even make sense in the context of the movie. In one scene, there’s an evil vampire who’s looking for Morbius, so he tries to intimidate Bancroft into telling him where Morbius is. When Bancroft tells him twice that she hasn’t seen Morbius, he leaves. By this point, it’s already established that he could use his heightened echolocation to find Morbius. That’s even what he does later, so why was the scene included at all? If it was to have an interaction between the villain and Bancroft, there are ways it could’ve happened without sacrificing the movie’s logic.
In spite of all this, what bothered me the most was probably the post credit scenes. Spoiler alert, but the scenes show that Vulture, played by Michael Keaton, from “Spider-Man: Homecoming” was transported to the “Mobius” universe. It’s implied he was transported because of the spell in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” but this disregards that movie for the sake of Vulture’s inclusion.
In “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” the spell took people who knew Peter Parker’s identity from other dimensions and brought them to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – MCU for short – timeline. It doesn’t make sense for Vulture to be taken from the MCU and placed in a different, seemingly random dimension. Besides, Doctor Strange fixed the spell at the end of the film, so Vulture shouldn’t be in the “Morbius” timeline regardless. It honestly felt like a half-hearted excuse for Sony to cram more villains into these movies. This is the same practice that killed both Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s “Spider-Man” series, and it’s what will probably kill Sony’s new universe.
Honestly, the best part of my experience was seeing the “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” teaser trailer before “Morbius” started. Not only was the animation stunning to see on the big screen, but looking back, it reminds me how great “Spider-Man” movies could be if Sony just let creative people do their thing.
