Morbius (2022) Review
2/10
A biochemist with a degenerative blood disease develops a treatment from vampire bats, tests it on himself, and becomes something with enhanced abilities and an appetite he can’t control. The 2 isn’t for incompetence. The photography is professional, Jared Leto is trying, and there’s a version of this premise that works. The 2 is for a film with no reason to exist beyond a rights arrangement. That’s visible in every scene.
What makes it worth writing about is the afterlife. It failed, became a joke, was re-released into theaters because the joke was popular, and failed again in front of a smaller audience. That’s a sequence of events nobody had produced before.
Morbius bores me more than it offends me, and I think that’s worse. It has a dying scientist, vampire bats and Matt Smith, and it still plays like a spreadsheet with a soundtrack. The 2 is there because I can’t find a single choice in it that somebody made out of love.
Why It Exists
Sony holds film rights to a large number of characters connected to Spider-Man and those rights lapse if films aren’t made. Morbius is one of those characters. That’s the entire commissioning logic and the film can’t hide it. Nothing in the picture suggests anybody had a story they wanted to tell, and everything in it suggests a slot on a schedule that needed filling before a date.
The giveaway is the connective material. The film contains references to a wider universe it’s not part of, a villain from another studio’s continuity appearing in a post-credits scene that makes no sense, and a hero whose relationship to any other property is never established.
The post-credits sequence is worth describing because it’s the purest example of the problem. A character arrives from a different film series, through a mechanism nobody explains, proposes an alliance for reasons nobody states, and the scene exists to imply a future nobody had planned. Compare that to how the good films on this site came about. Somebody wanted to make them. That’s a practical point. Intent, or the lack of it, shows in the first ten minutes of anything, and Morbius loses me well before that mark.
A work commissioned to satisfy an obligation will read as one, and no amount of production value conceals it. Readers can’t always name the problem and they tone the absence of intent immediately. The equivalent for a writer is the book written because a contract requires a book.
Ask what the work wants to say before you ask what it needs to contain. If the answer to the first is nothing, the second won’t save it.
The diagnostic is whether the project would exist if the commercial reason vanished. If it wouldn’t, the reader is going to feel that, and they won’t be able to tell you why.
The Script Has No Second Act
Michael Morbius is introduced as brilliant, principled and dying. He develops a cure, it works and it’s a cost, and he must decide what to do about it. That’s a functioning first act and the film then has no idea what to do for an hour. The middle consists of Morbius avoiding two FBI agents who never accomplish anything, a hospital sequence, a laboratory sequence, and a great deal of walking between locations while the plot waits.
Nothing escalates. His condition doesn’t worsen in a way that forces a decision, his moral problem is stated once and never tested, and he acquires control over his appetite offscreen with no scene establishing how.
The antagonist is his childhood friend, who takes the same treatment, and who becomes evil for no reason the film supplies beyond being the antagonist. Matt Smith is visibly having more fun than anybody and the character has no position. Milo is the clearest illustration of the problem. He’s the same disease, takes the same cure, and the film needs him to be the villain, so he simply enjoys killing people while Morbius doesn’t. There’s no argument between them, only an assignment of roles.
That’s a waste of a real idea, and it’s the worst choice in the film. Two dying men take a treatment, one accepts what it costs and one doesn’t, and the disagreement between them is a real subject. The film gestures at it in a single exchange and then has them fight in a corridor. I’d have built the entire second act around that argument.
The Effects Are the Wrong Choice
When Morbius moves at speed, the film renders him with a trailing smoke effect and a digital blur that makes the geography of every fight unreadable.
That decision is worth examining because it’s a solution to a problem nobody had. The character is fast, the audience needs to understand where he is, and the effect actively prevents that.
The color grade makes it worse. Most of the film takes place at night, in blue-grey, in locations lit from a single direction, and there are sequences where it’s unclear what’s happening on screen. Compare what Open Range or The Wild Bunch do with clarity in an action sequence. Those films cost a fraction of this one in real terms and you always know where every person is standing.
Never solve a problem the reader doesn’t have. A technique that obscures the thing it’s meant to convey is worse than no technique at all. The test is whether somebody could describe what happened afterward. If they can’t, the sequence failed regardless of how it looked.
Clarity is the only non-negotiable quality in an action scene. Beauty, scale and speed are optional and legibility isn’t.
Prose has the same failure mode. A fight written in fragments and impressions reads as confusion, and the reader stops attending instead of leaning in.
The Meme and the Re-Release
After the film failed, a joke spread online about a line of dialogue and about the character’s supposed popularity, largely built on people who hadn’t seen it. Sony read the volume of discussion as demand and returned the film to over a thousand theaters. It took a reported few hundred thousand dollars across an entire weekend. That’s close to nothing.
I find the re-release funnier than anything in the film itself. A studio looked at a joke, saw a business plan, and booked more than a thousand theaters to test it. Somebody signed off on that, and I’d pay good money to read the memo.
That’s the most useful thing about the whole episode and it deserves to be understood properly. Online engagement was mistaken for audience interest, the two turned out to be unrelated, and the experiment was run publicly with real money. Every writer who has watched a post do numbers and then watched the book attached to it sell nothing recognizes this. Attention isn’t appetite and the distance between them is where a great deal of marketing spending disappears.
The mockery was also not really about the film. It was about a line that had been repeated until it stopped meaning anything, and the people repeating it were performing a shared joke instead of expressing curiosity about a vampire picture.
What It Proves
The lesson isn’t that the film is bad. Plenty of films are bad and most of them are forgotten instead of studied. The lesson is that a work produced to hold a right, released into a market that hadn’t asked for it, is a category that now exists in volume, and audiences have become fast at detecting it. Sony made several more of these and the pattern held. Each one arrived with a recognizable character, a professional budget, no discernible reason, and a result somewhere between disappointing and catastrophic.
Venom is the counterexample that proves the rule, since it worked and the reason it worked is that somebody found a tone. A man arguing with the thing living inside him is a comic premise, the film committed to it, and audiences responded to a decision instead of to a character whose name they happened to recognize.
Leto is the part of it I’d defend. He’s committed, he’s putting in the effort, and he’s stuck inside a film that gives him nothing to do. That happens to good performers more often than the record suggests.
Jared Harris is the other one. He plays the doctor who raised both men, is in perhaps four scenes, and gives each of them more weight than the writing supports. Watching a performer that good work inside this material is the most interesting thing in the picture.
When a category of work starts failing consistently, the cause is usually structural instead of creative. Look at how the thing was commissioned before you look at how it was executed. Individual failures are interesting and patterns are instructive.
Don’t confuse a bad work with a work that had no reason to be made. The first is a craft problem and the second is a decision problem, and only one of them is fixable by trying harder. A committed performance inside an empty vehicle is worth noticing, because the same is true of good sentences in a book that’s nothing to say. Effort isn’t the variable.
Should you watch Morbius?
No. The 2 is for a film made to hold a license, dropped on a market that hadn’t asked for it, and then sent back out on the strength of a joke. Leto and Jared Harris deserved a script and Matt Smith deserved a character, and I’d like that damn middle hour back. Watch it only if you want to see what a licensing exercise looks like from the inside, and what happens when a studio mistakes ten million people laughing at something for ten million people wanting to see it.
