Warning: This is going to be a rambling review from yours truly.
My introduction to Morbius, the Marvel comics character was this dude:
A character from the 90s Spiderman cartoon series. Unlike the other Spiderman cartoons, this one introduced Morbius, had Blade as a guest star, and I have to admit it, I was a vampire nut as a teen. So superheroes and vampires? Awesome.
In true comic style Morbius the vampire is not your traditional Dracula style vampire (although those kinds of vampires do exist in the Marvel universe, as evidenced by Blade, not to mention Dracula himself is a cannon Marvel character–even being a romantic rival to Deadpool.) Instead Marvel treated vampirism with the same respect as they treat actual science–that is very little.
I have to complain, as a person whose dayjob is in animal medicine, that this movie’s treatment of vampire bats is…hilariously inaccurate. I mean, this movie’s whole treatment of science in general (centrifuges aren’t chemical mixers *cringe*) is horrific.
But, let’s drop a salt block on the table and continue.
The movie is your basic origin story of a horror themed super hero, erm, anti, hero, um…I don’t even know what the movie tried to make Dr. Morbius out to be. Dr. Morbius and his coworker rent out a container ship of mercs and sail out to international waters to perform experiments on himself trying to cure his fatal blood disease. My read is that the disease causes his blood (and others because he’s not the only one to suffer from this disease) to clot up so infusing himself with a serum from vampire bats, whose saliva has an anti coagulant in it, might change his DNA and save his life.
Instead for some reason he gets buff as hell and superpowers. I mean, there are weirder origins **side eyes the entire X Men franchise**. The only power explained by this sciencey science Dr. Morbius’ new echolocation powers which are admittedly really cool. In fact all the powers are very cool, with fantastic visual effects.
Morbius goes all monster and kills the mercs on the ship (and later another character even outright says that him killing mercs doesn’t really matter because they were bad people, which was a hilarious glib admission for a comic movie.) Then abandons the ship a la Dracula and goes into hiding.
And then…and then…and then we get probably the best part of the movie (other than the visuals): Matt “Eleventh Doctor” Smith as a Marvel Villain!! Milo is Morbius’ best friend and personal pocket book who discovers the cure and has even less qualms about imbibing in some mad science. In true bromance style he then tries to convince Morbius to fully realize his new glory by killing lots of people.
Morbius, who hasn’t exactly been the most ethical person thus far, is still the title character, so he has to stop Milo from killing people. Really it might as well be Jared Leto playing both parts for how completely transparent the theme of a man fighting his darkest instincts is. That part isn’t at all new territory, and I think every Mavel fan everywhere has gotten the idea between the character arcs of…just about every character in the Marvel universe.
But still the fights are awesome and the visuals are great.
One last con: I was pretty disappointed that there were no cameos from Blade or any of the traditional vampires that are cannon to the Marvel world setting. I know there’s a reboot coming, but honestly Marvel gets the desire of fans to see those easter eggs so I really expected with Morbius and Milo causing so much very public havoc in New York City to see some kind of nod to these guys.
