A Sony stand alone, the movie Morbius feels like Halloween. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa, who has directed darker films before like Safe House, directs Jared Leto (in the title role role) and several other accomplished actors in Marvel’s first “horror” title. The music was composed by Jon Ekstrand. I must state my bias — I am not fond of Jared Leto because of his creepy behavior during the height of his band Thirty Seconds to Mars.
The film begins by showing doctor Micheal Morbius getting off a helicopter to retrieve vampire bats from a cave. Instantly, I realized that Jared Leto’s acting is not his best, he looked like he just got out of acting school and hasn’t slept since. The first scene is both dramatic and far-fetched, when Morbius stands and miraculously the vampire bats come to him. Next Morbius and his best friend Lucious are thoroughly introduced by splicing scenes of them in the hospital as children; both Morbius and Lucious have a rare blood disease that Morbius dedicates his life to curing. The movie then centers around Morbius’ discovery of the cure for his illness and his best friends’ opposing view on it. Overall the writing was bland and predictable. Morbius brought nothing new to Marvel. Jared Leto’s acting was nowhere near his best and really the only acting I was happy with was Matt Smith’s (Lucious) acting. To make things worse, the dialogue stuck out to me as sub par; if a monster is crawling on the walls, “get him” is not the correct response.
The effects were not as bad as the writing. I was impressed with the precision of the facial CGI which was present in most of the scenes. But while the visual effects were almost all well done, the motion was not as smooth as I would expect it to be. The camera angles, especially during fight scenes, became overwhelming and not very effective. The sound engineering was decent but not reaching for any awards.
I’m aware that some reviews are saying that Morbius is great, but for me it is unoriginal and poorly presented. When I watch a movie, I want to see something witty and impactful and Morbius doesn’t have those qualities. I do want to read the Morbius comics after watching the movie and encourage you to as well. Even though everyone is looking forward to The Multiverse of Madness, I wish that the more love went into producing Morbius.
