Recapping Morbius So That You Don’t Have to Watch It

Okay so Michael Morbius is in Costa Rica trying to find some vampire bats and he shows up with a helicopter full of people who followed him willingly despite not knowing where they’re going or why and then he borrows this guy’s knife because why plan anything and then he cuts his hand and all the bats fly at him. They’ve just established that these bats respond viciously to the smell of blood and eat animals whole but they don’t eat Michael why I don’t know he’s friends with them or something. DISTRACTION FLASHBACK: Michael is a sad little sick boy and he has a friend who’s also sad and sick but Michael’s smarter so he goes off to a school for smart people and ends up being a doctor and this other little boy has to settle for being a rich moron. PRESENT DAY: Michael is trying to find a cure to this disease which is never named or explained and he’s taking care of this little girl in the hospital who also has the disease and you think the movie’s going to be at least partially about saving her thus establishing our protagonist as somewhat likable but no he just induces a coma and she stays in it for the rest of her life because the screenwriter forgot about her. So then we discover that Michael has somehow built a secret laboratory in the middle of this active hospital without anybody else knowing and it has a special bat chamber that nobody’s ever asked about until today which is full of all the bats from Costa Rica and you’re like okay, but how did he get hundreds of bats from Costa Rica to New York? Did they all ride in the helicopter with him? And then how did he get all of them into an active hospital without anybody noticing? But fine the bats are there and he is friends with the bats. Fine.

So then he illegally develops this serum and illegally tests it on mice but then he decides that to illegally inject it into himself he needs to be on a boat in international waters for some reason. So he goes on a boat and takes the serum and it turns him into a monster man and he kills all of his hired goons and his girlfriend gets knocked out but it’s okay she’s not dead she’s just been beaten unconscious and probably has brain damage so he tucks her in with a blanket like she’s having a nice nap and abandons her. And then the police show up and one of them is Tyrese and every time they appear they say things like “How odd, these people have been drained of all their blood” and “holy shitballs… no… those can’t be… bite marks?” I think it’s supposed to be all tense and mysterious but it’s not because we already know that this movie is about a fucking vampire so all these scenes do is waste my time and Tyrese’s time. There’s another scene where Michael is friends with the bats and it actually kinda makes sense this time because he’s something of a bat-man if you will but that still doesn’t explain why he was friends with them before when he was just a normal guy. But then Michael’s old friend (who is not a bat) the sick child from the flashback who has heretofore been a perfectly nice and sympathetic person decides for no reason at all that he’s going to become the most evil person in the world so he takes the serum and just starts murdering innocent people left and right and they have a vampire fight with slow motion and loud bass whomps. I fall asleep for maybe ten minutes and it is the best part of the movie by far.

I wake up to find that evil vampire man has killed literally every other character in the movie but not Michael’s girlfriend as it turns out because with her dying breath she bit Michael on the lip and drank a drop of his blood because somehow she knew that would cause her to become a vampire too even though nobody in the movie has turned into a vampire without taking the serum but whatever she doesn’t need it. And then Michael fights the bad guy and kills him so quickly that I don’t even remember the scene happening (but it must have happened, right?) and then the movie ends and you’re like “okay, but where’s Michael Keaton? I saw Michael Keaton in the trailer and Michael Keaton’s the Vulture and I only waded through this massive pile of shit because I thought it was going to tie into the Spider-Man movies which are actually movies I like, as opposed to this movie which I strongly dislike. And then they’re like “Hang on just a minute there, true believer, we promised you Michael Keaton, and guess what? HERE HE IS!” And you’re like “OH NO PLEASE NOT LIKE THIS…”

So then we cut to the interdimensional rift from No Way Home. This rift works two ways: it brings people from the Sony-Verse into the MCU and then it returns those people to their original chronology. Those are the only directions it goes in. So when Michael Keaton is transported from the MCU to the Sony universe despite never having been there before we are just supposed to believe that he is the only person on Earth to whom this happened and that it happened for absolutely no reason besides the writers not understanding the script to Marvel’s movie and nobody correcting them for some reason. Seriously, they had to reshoot entirely new Michael Keaton scenes and cut J. Jonah Jameson out of this movie because they got that far into production and wasted millions of dollars without realizing that the MCU and the Sony universe were not one in the same despite this being established way the fuck back in Venom 2. Seriously guys if you’re trying to maintain a canon you should probably watch the other movies in the franchise first just a thought holy shit.

Hey, remember this cool shot from the trailer? It’s not in the movie! And when they asked the director about it he said that he didn’t shoot that scene and had no idea what it was referencing! Hooray!

So anyway now Michael Keaton is in the Sony universe for no reason at all and despite having never traveled between universes before and despite the fact that he will never see his daughter again and never get revenge on Spider-Man he seems pretty unphased by the whole thing and makes a quip. And then the movie ends with Vulture showing up in his wing suit even though that’s still in the other universe so I guess he had to build it again and then he says to Morbius “Hey I think the two of us should team up” so YES Sony are still trying to make a Sinister Six movie a full decade after they failed at it the first time, a horrible idea they are so singularly obsessed with that it’s almost kind of perversely impressive. And you’re like “Okay, but how did Vulture even know that Michael had superpowers? And how did he know that their interests would align? And what even are their interests? And how did Vulture even know how to find him? Does Michael even know that Spider-Man exists? We still haven’t seen him in this universe, and has anybody even mentioned him? And what is anybody’s goal ever? And a second ago wasn’t Michael going to kill himself because he figured out that if he left his vampirism untreated that he would soon turn into an insatiable unthinking monster man hungry for human blood? When did he decide to allow that to happen to him, and why? And why did you save Michael Keaton for the fucking post-credits scenes like we’re all supposed to lose our shit and be like HOLY FUCK IT’S MICHAEL KEATON WHAT A TWIST YOU GUYS ARE BRILLIANT after he was featured prominently in the trailers for the film in scenes that aren’t even in the movie.

But on the plus side, he does have some form of bat radar.

I don’t believe a reviewer can successfully boil down a complex and multi-faceted opinion into a simple letter or number grade so I’ll just end by saying 1 out of 10 F minus.