Morbius

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Just to add a whole bunch more confusion as to where things in Marvel are taking place, Sony brings in 'Morbius' while a future 'Blade' movie is slated for the MCU at some point in the near future. We don't particularly know what will happen with Sony's Spider-Man movies either, as Andrew Garfield has quite a lot of fans backing him up for another Sony movie. Time will tell, but before it all comes together, here's the next chapter in Marvel's Multiverse Movie Multitude.

We meet young Michael Morbius (Charlie Shotwell) at the age of 10, where he bonds with his surrogate brother, Lucien (Joseph Esson). The pair share a blood disease in common and reside at a hospital in Greece. After an incident involving Lucien and his medical equipment, it's discovered that Michael is highly intelligent - a regular MacGyver if you will. As a result, Michael and Milo's (by the way, Michael calls Lucien "Milo" in this) adoptive father and hospital director, Nicholas (Jared Harris), makes arrangements for Michael to attend medical school in New York City.

After 25 years, Michael (Jared Leto) is up for a Nobel Prize for his work on synthetic blood, which he publicly declines. In the hopes of splicing bat genes with his own, he hopes to cure his blood disease, and has therefore captured a collection of bats to experiment on, as discovered by his colleague, Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona). His experimentation, however, is illegal, but after confessing his plans to both Nicholas and Milo (Matt Smith), he receives funding to carry out his experiment on international waters.

The experiment, as we can all tell by trailers and common sense, transforms Michael into a vampire with seemingly uncontrollable bloodlust. Once his hunger is satisfied, he pretty much goes back to normal. The conclusion is that the cure works, and even enhances his abilities, gaining him things like echolocation, super strength and agility, and even being treated as a fellow bat by his bat buddies. The unfortunate drawback, however, is this thirst problem. His synthetic blood can only feed him for so long. But when Milo is refused help due to the cures unfortunate side effects, Milo takes matters into his own hands, giving us another Marvel non-MCU anti-hero in the form of Morbius, the living vampire.

This one clearly didn't do so hot with the critics, and a lot of that has to do with some of this origin story stuff being played out - especially when it's hard to figure out just who was asking for a 'Morbius' movie, as opposed to just having him come in as a villain somewhere in a future 'Spidey' or 'Blade' movie. Nevertheless, perhaps the most intriguing aspects of this movie, to no one's surprise, are the mid-credit sequences which, without saying too much, tie in with the events of the MCU's 'No Way Home'. It paves the way for some future stuff, but it's hard to say exactly what.

All in all, I came out of this with similar feelings that I had with the two 'Venom' movies. These films are by no means spectacular, but I'll be damned if I don't have fun with them. I wasn't on the lookout for this, but I can't deny it grabbed my attention, being somewhat familiar with the Marvel villain. I'm glad that I saw it, and didn't come out of it regretting a thing. There are a few rough spots here and there, and I can see where critics are coming from. But if you can view this with the proper lens, I think you can enjoy it for what it is. One thing's for sure - Leto was much better here than he ever was as the Joker (and I stand by that).

3/5

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