MORBIUS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Here we go again. Yet another origins story from the Marvel stable given the whizzbang blockbuster treatment, this time one whose extensive Wikipedia page (I've never heard of any of these characters so I have to look all of them up afterwards) suggests is actually a long-standing Spider-man villain who occasionally swaps sides to join forces against an even bigger evil. As a standalone movie, this one seems to recast him as a reluctant hero rather than an outright bad guy: a scientific genius transformed into a monster by his own experiments and now struggling to retain his essential humanity and morality and conquer his need for fresh human blood.

Morbius (sadly nothing to do with the medical horrors of Doctor Who's 1976 story The Brain Of Morbius) is actually Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), victim of a rare blood disease since childhood and creator of an artificial blood which has helped with countless battlefield injuries. Experimenting on himself with a serum derived from South American vampire bats, he turns himself into a vampiric monster who cannot control his thirst for blood and his need to kill. But his only friend Milo (Matt Smith), suffering from the same illness, steals the serum for himself and embraces his new powers and freedoms...

Eventually it comes to a head, as these things always do, with the two beating the hell out of each other and flinging one another through buildings and walls and pavements in what is frankly the most boring manner possible. It's the dullest and least enjoyable Marvel movie thus far and frankly gives the glummest of the DC franchise a run for its misery money. There's no fun to be had and it's difficult to care who wins, so all you're left with is the whizzy CGI. Worse, it ends in the usual way with teasers for the next film (maybe), dragging in Michael Keaton's The Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming and possibly setting up something that Wikipedia suggests is a supervillain group called The Sinister Six, because they're going to keep milking this damned thing until the heat death of the Universe at least.

While it's nice to find a comicbook movie that doesn't climax with cities, planets or whole Universes up for casual and meaningless destruction, and settles for a body count of maybe twenty rather than Thanos' billions, Morbius is still thoroughly uninteresting stuff. Yes, the CGI and monster effects are perfectly good, but we're now in an era where good CGI is as much a standard as the film being in focus and there's no excuse for anything less than pixel perfection. You could wonder what dimension this is happening in if The Vulture has suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and/or whether it's part of the Multiverse which may or may not be explained in the next film, or the one after that. Or you might just wondering why they're still bothering with this nonsense (apart from the money, obviously) and, by extension, why the audience is still bothering.

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