"I'm a Rat, You're a Rat": Morbius Movie Review
The first "Suicide Squad" can sleep easy, now there's a superhero movie that turned out to be times worse.
The world is moving forward, and the industry is stomping around for the second year, often letting fillers into theaters instead of blockbusters. Last year, Marvel Studios made a penny with "Eternal" and "Shan-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" - this year, Sony Corporation is throwing in the towel. "Morbius" is a similarly unnecessary movie where everything is mediocre and the clichés are taken straight from the superhero movies of the 2000s. The plot of "Morbius" is reminiscent, to say the least, of Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man 3: Enemy in Reflection" and Mark Webb's forgotten "New Spider-Man" with a lizard story: scientist Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) suffers from a rare disease and invents a "cure" for his ailment. Morbius decided to mix bat and human DNA, turning himself into a vampire. With the wave of a magic wand and a medical syringe, the plasma of the two creatures mixed and worked wonders - Morbius was cured, his body bulged with muscle, but his bloodlust appeared. His similarly sickly and incompetent brother Milo (Matt Smith) uses the essence mindlessly, even though 20 years ago Uncle Ben told Peter Parker that the greater the power, the greater the responsibility.
Genetically, "Morbius" is part of a worldwide trend of rehabilitating the villain in some stories and not at all in others. In our case, the villain is represented by a do-gooder who saves the world from his invention. The tendency to reject the villain is due to the fact that his image is always associated with some social or ethnic group, which can then be offended. So Hollywood bosses decided that it was better to do without antagonists, or to display white privileged cisgender men and women as them.
This made it harder for the screenwriters, because now the characters' conflicts have to be internal, you have to develop the psychology of the characters. Dr. Morbius struggles with himself and his jealous brother because he doesn't want to hurt the world: a timeless idea, but recycled by superhero movies long ago. Also, the brothers' conflict is so shallow, and their relationship and past is given minimal time, which makes the pathos of the action lie at the level of a family quarrel, where the younger is jealous of the older.
It would seem that a vampire movie is bound to be gory and violent, but no, the age rating is PG-13. Sony and Marvel allow themselves only once a deep cut in the middle ground, otherwise hiding any violence, although the authors use elements of horror (e.g. a corridor with flashing lights). One could show sharp fangs thrusting into bodies and draining them, but one pacifist vampire, Morbius, drinks the artificial blood invented years ago, while his brother Milo prefers to kill outside the frame or drag his victims into the bushes.
"Morbius" could have had original content, but instead it's just clichés. The "girl in danger" trope is there; the cheap Hans Zimmer parody is present; the silly and unnecessary police are also in line. Not only is the opportunity to create horror lost, but so is the attempt at any social commentary. The brothers are English rich men, so their becoming vampires could be an allusion to a capitalist society where the elites profit from the lower class. This is also absent, as is the reasoning about the dangers of scientific cognition and human experimentation. A love line could have been developed where Michael worries about his girlfriend and colleague Martina (Adria Archona), but the film has too much competition in that field - the "Twilight" franchise (2008-2012). So "Morbius" turned out to be a picture without reference points, without any good reason to exist, released because of Sony and Marvel's desire to suck money out of fans. Only if Morbius turned into a predator, the project of the same name degenerated into a parasite.
This article was sponsored by Rebecca Williams
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