Morbius (2022)

Posted By: brian@brianschell.com June 30, 2022

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

The origin story of Morbius the Living Vampire. It was okay. Just okay. Don’t overthink the science at all. Or the physics. Or the way real people act and talk. But it was okay.

Synopsis

In the jungles of Costa Rica, a helicopter lands. The pilot warns that they shouldn’t be here once it gets dark. Because of a jungle monster? Some hideous beast that hunts man at night. No, just lots of bats. Dr. Michael Morris gets out of the copter, but he’s on crutches and can barely walk. He’s here to investigate vampire bats. He cuts his hand, on purpose, and it attracts a swarm of vampire bats. Apparently in this universe they are the piranha of the skys.

We flash back 25 years earlier, in Greece. Michael gets a new roommate at the hospital named Lucien, but for some reason, Michael calls him Milo. They both have an incurable DNA disease. The only way to stay alive is with a transfusion three times a day. The doctor in charge, Emil Nicholas, wants to send Michael to a school for gifted children in New York. Michael leaves, but promises Milo that he’ll find a cure.

Michael grows up and becomes the world’s leading expert on blood diseases; he even invented synthetic blood. He works at the hospital with Dr. Martine Bancroft; they are working on combining human and bat DNA. Well, that’s what Michael is doing. She’s there to tell him that he shouldn’t be doing that. Milo is tremendously rich and has been financing the experiments. Michael injects the cure into a mouse which promptly dies– no, it gets back up again. It worked!

Michael goes to see Milo, who is still under the care of Dr. Nicholas. They’re both still very sickly and walk with crutches.

Later, Michael and Martine sail out into international waters because the cure is super illegal and dangerous. She injects Michael with the cure, and they wait. Michael turns into a fanged monster and kills one of the security guards. He dodges bullets and moves with super speed, killing the other guards and the sailors too.

When the sun comes up, he turns back into his human-looking self again, except now he’s ripped and healthy-looking. He sees what he did on the security cameras and is surprised.

Agent Stroud is in charge of the investigation into all those dead, bloodless bodies. Milo hears about the carnage on the news; Martine is in a coma after being injured during the attack. As he goes back to his lab, he starts weakening again; he still needs to “consume” blood. He starts pigging out on the artificial blood, but he knows that’s not gonna work forever.

Milo comes to the lab for a visit and thinks Michael has found a cure. Milo wants the cure, but Michael says the cost will be too high; he’s killed people. They argue. Meanwhile, Martine wakes up in the hospital and talks to the two investigators.

That night, a vampire-monster-man-thing kills a nurse. Michael wonders if he did it himself. The detectives show up and ask Michael some questions about his research. He runs and jumps with superhuman speed, but they get him anyway. They take him to the station for the murder of the nurse. Milo visits him in jail and slips him a bag of blood. We notice that Milo’s not limping anymore…

Michael breaks out of jail and tracks down Milo as he’s killing a newsstand guy. He admits he killed the nurse; he couldn’t control it. But he’s okay with that now. “We can do anything,” Milo tempts. “We’ve evolved!” Milo then kills a bunch of cops. The detective decide to keep an eye on Martine, but even she knows how to lose these cops.

He takes over the lair of some counterfeiters and uses their lab equipment to get to work on a cure for the cure. Michael and Martine have some “me time” as Milo listens with his super hearing. The cops figure out that the killer isn’t Michael. Dr. Nicholas sees all this on TV, and he recognizes both vampires. He pays a visit on Milo, and the two of them argue. It ends poorly for Dr. Nicholas.

Michael finds Nicholas’ almost dead that evening, just alive to give Michael dying words of encouragement. Milo gets Martine, and Michael can’t rescue her in time. Michael and Milo fight, and there’s lot of CGI and CGI bats and more CGI. Michael eventually injects the poisonous antidote into Milo, who dies. Martine, on the other hand, wakes up as a vampire.

Commentary

The equipment used for counterfeiting money is the same as that used for DNA gene splicing drug creation? Mmmmkay. It’s just one of the ways this movie brutalizes science. The performances and acting are all fine. The science is ridiculous. Jared Harris is wasted in a minimal role.

So there was all this origin story for Michael and Milo, and then they had a big fight, and then it was done. This movie was missing a middle act. Well, it was there I suppose, just really weak. Not only that, but almost the entire final battle was pure CGI, and I have to wonder how much Jared Leto and Matt Smith were even involved in that final scenes.

It’s not as bad as people would have you think, but it’s definitely got some serious issues. It ended, and I was like, “Wait– That’s it?”