Let's talk about Morbius (SPOILERS)

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Just like the title says there are going to be spoilers in this discussion so if you haven't seen the movie and want to see it I would suggest that you skip this and go see it first, then come back here and participate afterwards.

Before we get into things I want to say that I enjoyed the movie for the most part and this is surprising to me because of the following reasons.

  • I generally do not like superhero films, especially ones made in conjunction with Marvel
  • I was not familiar with the comics before seeing this film
  • I don't particularly care for Jared Leto as an actor


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I decided to watch this film after running across a hilarious YouTube video where it claimed it was the "best film ever made" and then went on to completely make up information about how well it did in theaters and on review sites. I am quite certain that this was a piss-take brought on by criticism the author must have received for previously stating some negative things about the movie. I highly suggest you watch this "review" as it is one of the funnier things about films I have seen in a while.

My thoughts about the film

As someone that doesn't like superhero films for the most part, I went into this expecting it to be terrible but was actually really surprised at how much I liked it. Most reviews called the plot "nonsensical" but I found it to be quite the opposite. I enjoyed the fact that the hero isn't really a hero in that unlike Spiderman or Batman or some other hero, Morbius wasn't really all that interested in helping the public or fighting crime. He was simply looking for a cure for his own ailment and trying cure himself as well as other people who suffer from an undefined blood illness that seems to be akin to leukemia. They do not define what the illness is but only describe that Michael Morbius has this illness and is an orphan. Michael is really intelligent and devotes his life to curing this undisclosed illness.


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As Michael gets older he makes great advances in curing his ailment by splicing human DNA or something with vampire bats to create a serum of sorts that makes it so he can move and live his life like a normal human. Previously he had very limited use of his legs and had to get blood transfusions multiple times a day. After injecting the serum he not only doesn't have these ailments but he also discovers the side-effects of superhuman strength, acute hearing and other increased senses, and also a vampiric desire for blood.

Up to this point I am totally on board with the story although there were a couple of issues I had with the story, especially the fact that nobody seems to think there is anything unusual about his lab and nobody really asks any questions about the fact that he has a gigantic vampire bat aquarium of sorts in his office. This is something that has always annoyed me about superhero films because things like this would be questioned in the real world.

Anyway, it's a Marvel film so we'll just pass on the realism.

Morbius is concerned with the fact that he cannot control his impulse to kill when injected with the serum and struggles to find a way to not kill, which suggests he is one of the good guys as we would expect in Marvel films. However, we need a villain and this is where the movie kind of loses me and I thought it was a really stupid choice for the film-makers to create his nemesis the way that they did.


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The decision to make Morbius' arch-nemesis in the film his childhood best friend and fellow blood-disease sufferer "Milo" was a bad choice in my mind because there doesn't seem to be any real motivation for these two to want to kill one another. They are lifelong buds and basically BFF's, yet one day Milo just up and decides that he needs to kill Morbius because: reasons.


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This is where the film loses its direction in my mind because while coming up with a villain is always going to be difficult, it really doesn't make any sense to me that the one person that Morbius has been closest to his entire life would just turn on him like that and not just disagree with him, but also become maniacally obsessed with ending his life. There are several other things that don't make any sense such as the fact that Milo is never told about the serum yet he just happens upon it and then somehow learns how to inject it into his own spine and does so. The only indication we are given that this has happened is when Milo visits Morbius in prison, pretending to be his lawyer, and then accidentally leaves his walking stick behind.

As we would expect, Morbius emerges victorious after strangely obtaining the ability to fly somehow and eliminates Milo in the most humane way possible. We never have a chance to empathize with Milo's character because his motivations to destroy his lifelong friend are too far-fetched from the start.


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The film was widely mocked for what the critics claim was poor use of CGI and practical effects but this was actually where I thought the movie shined. I enjoyed the action sequences and other than towards the end where flight becomes part of the ordeal, I thought it was very nicely executed. Morbius as a character has definitive weaknesses in that he must drink blood on a regular basis in order to maintain his superhuman powers but doesn't want to prey on other humans to make this happen.

The defeat of Milo was an eventuality and not at all a surprise - we could all see that coming. Where the film kind of lost me was where at the end, as Marvel tends to do, they introduce new characters into the mix in order to lead in to what I can only presume will be a future film when Michael Keaton just appears out of nowhere and gets introduced into the mix. Until the very end, Keaton had absolutely nothing to do with the movie and I guess this is where the comic book nerds would be the only ones that know what the hell is going on.


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During the credits Keaton appears as "Vulture" and I had to look that up in order to know what I was looking at. I am not familiar enough with the MCU to understand what was going on at the time. Spiderman is mentioned at some point although I do not recall why. I have to presume that this is a lead in to a future film that Marvel will undoubtedly make. According to what I have read this ties into the Spiderman universe and it is going to be a complicated film for them to make given the current ownership of the various rights to certain characters.

From what I could guess there appears to be an upcoming partnership between "Vulture" and Morbius where I presume that Spiderman will have to take them both on and I am predicting that Morbius will in the end turn on Vulture to help Spiderman. This is just a guess based on what Marvel seem to do in their very formulaic approach to films.


Morbius was torn to shreds by professional and personal critics and it underperformed at the box office as well, which is odd for a Marvel film. It's funny to me that this would be the case because out of the last several Marvel films I have seen, I enjoyed this one probably the most. Despite the very serious flaw in the storyline - mostly because I don't like Milo becoming the villain - I thought this was a pretty fantastic film. I say this as someone that doesn't like superhero films either. I only watched the movie because I had been told how terrible it was.

I suppose you could say that I look forward to seeing more Morbius in the future because I like the character. I just don't like all the other ones they surrounded him with. It remains to be seen what Marvel will do with Morbius but based on the very poor box-office and overwhelmingly negative reception, I would guess that they aren't going to do very much with it.... which is a shame. It did sell over a trillion tickets after all :P


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What did you think of Morbius? Did you like it or did you hate it like most of the reviewers did? I've come to the conclusion that as far as me and Marvel films are concerned that I must be at odds with the true die-hard fan. It seems that whatever they end up liking, I end up disliking, and vice-versa.



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5 comments
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i love how you manage to bring up some really good points about this movie, it seems that the "memes" overshadowed the things that it did right, I guess that is mediocre but far from being (At least objectively) the worst film of all time (or the best, haha).

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I thought the film was pretty good until they went a bit too over the top. I don't think The meme community certainly did a lot for this film after its release because I probably wouldn't have even bothered with it if it weren't for their constant appearance. It's Morbin' Time!

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Honestly I liked this movie, I think I made a post about it, the story is very interesting, but for fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this movie was a total disaster, but for people who only watch movies to distract and pass the time is amazing, the skills that has the hero of this movie is very interesting.

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I agree with everything you said there. I am not a fan of the MCU so for me, this film was actually better than most of the Marvel films I have seen, especially in the last few years.