Morbius: A Misguided Disaster

The wars over intellectual property are at a fever pitch. The cinematic landscape is filled with every studio trying to either build a franchise or establish a cinematic universe with the goal of longevity. Sony is currently the owner of the pantheon of characters associated with Spider-Man so they have been trying to make movies about the various members of his legendary rogues gallery. Morbius is the first attempt at this with a character that does not have the robust fanbase that Venom and Carnage have, and it is a perfect example of a disaster that stems from copious studio interference.

The central conflict of Morbius is a timeless story. It is a brother vs. brother story of what happens when ideological differences split two people and one has to stop the other from falling to their dark side. It is Anakin Skywalker vs. Obi-Wan Kenobi or Professor X vs. Magneto and has served movies well for years. The conflict at the center of Morbius between Morbius and Milo completely falls flat because the relationship between the two is not established well enough. It is a story that would have been better developed over a trilogy rather than over one movie so that when Milo and Morbius go from friends to enemies, there is an emotional resonance to the moment.

The fact that this all happens over the course of one movie is what happens when a studio attempts to build a cinematic universe using the villains for a well-known character. Any form of mythology uses villains or other antagonistic forces to be an obstacle for the hero to overcome. Maybe the villain gets some backstory to understand why they act as they do, but more often than not they are a caricature of the protagonist to show why they are a hero. Because of their role as an obstacle, they do not have a deep roster of other characters to have them face off against. Further complicating this is that Sony only owns the rights to use characters associated with Spider-Man so a character like Morbius who has ties to Blade, Doctor Strange, Man-Thing, Ghost Rider, Moon Knight, and other paranormal characters, is inherently fighting an uphill battle.

The movie is capped off by some of the most nonsensical narrative twists in the back half that just reeks of studio interference. At one point, two characters die in identical back-to-back scenes at the hands of the same character in an effort to motivate Morbius into action. At one point, Morbius goes out of his way to secure a street lab that is used once before Morbius inexplicably ends up back in the original lab. Both of these things seem like they are the splicing of multiple cuts of the movie together without checking for continuity, which is an amateur mistake to say the least. This does not even address the dissonance between where this movie should logically end, where the movie sets up that it should end, and where the movie actually does end. It is just a mess from frame one.

Don’t waste your time to see Morbius in theaters, don’t waste your time to watch Morbius on Starz or other Premium VOD platforms when that inevitably happens. Just pretend it never happened and move on. There is nothing of value missed by not watching this movie.

Final Rating: 0/10