So, I watched Morbius last week.
After it opened in theaters back in April, Morbius became one of the most talked about movies of the
year — on Twitter and Tumblr, anyway. I saw the memes. I had a chuckle. But, I never saw the movie
— until I noticed it was on Netflix. I checked it out, and now that I’ve seen it, I have a question:
What was all that about?
I realize we’ve moved on — what was once a firehose-like torrent of memes has weakened
to a sputtering trickle, like when your pump sprayer is almost out of air . . . Sorry,
I just sealed my deck last week. Anyway, nobody’s really talking about Morbius anymore,
but that’s okay. In fact, it’s better this way. Gaining some distance
from . . . whatever that was back there . . . is good! It furnishes perspective.
What was it about Morbius that made it so memetic? Actually, before we get to that question,
I have another, more basic one: what was it about Morbius that made it . . . a movie that exists?
Commercially, I get it. Morbius as a character falls under the umbrella of Spider-Man,
the one category of Marvel Comics intellectual property which Sony has the rights to. While it’s
been working these last several years with Marvel Studios to produce Spider-Man films
starring Tom Holland that take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sony has also been making
its own films featuring Spider-Man affiliated characters, in an attempt to build up its own
Spidey-centered Marvel movie franchise. Makes sense — again, from a commercial perspective.
But, creatively? Not so much. Admittedly, the two Venom films Sony has produced
starring Tom Hardy have been a lot of fun — I’ve enjoyed them as clever,
unpretentious throwbacks to the mid-tier action movies of my youth. They’re straightforward,
cast with appealing actors, some good jokes, and they’re in and out in under two-hours,
which is truly a blessing in this age of ridiculously bloated running times.
Though, even the Venom movies — as entertaining as they are — feel a little strange when considered
in the context of a Spider-Man-based movie franchise. Because — Sony’s Spider-Man films
take place in the MCU, alongside the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy and all those
really great Marvel shows on Disney Plus, and also Loki — it was fine — I didn’t love it. But,
the other films in Sony’s live-action cinematic spider-verse take place in another universe
altogether. And yeah, they’ve made some limited use of the multiverse concept recently introduced
into the MCU, so an appearance from ol’ webhead himself is only an interdimensional portal away,
but even so, it feels weird to build a movie franchise based
on Spider-Man characters that takes place in a world where there is no Spider-Man.
That sense of “what are we doing here?”, which is faintly present in the Venom movies,
is much stronger in Morbius, which lacks all the charms of the Venom films except
their sensible running time. Well, no — I take that back. The cast is good,
too. It’s a group of excellent actors doing their best with . . . whatever this is.
Because Morbius is not a very good movie, its status as a Spider-Man movie without
Spider-Man is far more distracting. Watching it, I was reminded of earlier DC Comics movies,
like Shaquille O’Neal’s Steel, a movie about a Superman character,
with no Superman; or Halle Berry’s Catwoman, a movie about a Batman villain, with no Batman.
I’m not saying movies like that can’t work — I’m just saying, they have to be really
good to overcome that initial puzzlement over why anyone would want to do this in the first place.
Todd Phillips’s Joker movie does it, more or less, partially because it’s decently
written and directed, and mostly because of what a cineastic mindfuck it is to see
Joaquin Phoenix play his character from The Master in a story that is a hybrid pastiche
of Taxi Driver and the King of Comedy — like, the fact that it’s a Joker movie without Batman
ends up being only about the fourth or fifth most interesting thing about it.
Morbius doesn’t have anywhere near that much going on with it, which is why it reminds me more of
this . . . than that.
Although, speaking of Batman movies without Batman, apparently Daniel Espinosa,
the director of Morbius, thought he was making one of those, too,
because the movie is filled with imagery shamelessly lifted from Christopher Nolan’s
Batman trilogy — and Jon Ekstrand’s score is . . . let’s just say highly reminiscent of
the work Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard did on those films, as well.
Morbius is not very good, but it’s also not very bad in a spectacular, memorable, “holy shit,
you’ve got to see this!” way. It’s clumsy, and awkward, and derivative — besides the multiple
obvious swipes from Nolan’s Batman movies, it also appropriates a line from Bill Bixby’s Incredible
Hulk — when Morbius goes too many hours without drinking blood, he gets hungry — and you wouldn’t
like him when he’s hungry. It’s supposed to be a joke — it falls flatter than a Pepsi.
Overall, Morbius feels like a film designed from the ground up to be shown five times
a day on TNT. It’s okay. Mostly kinda dull. It looks fine — not spectacular,
not embarrassing. The performances are mostly fine —
— great cast, like I said. Jared Harris, one of the world’s greatest living actors, classes the
joint up with a handful of scenes as the mentor of Morbius and his best friend/archenemy Milo.
Matt Smith is also good as Milo — when he becomes the villain he’s fun as a dancing,
snarling killer with vaguely defined superpowers. And, before he gets vamped, when he’s debilitated
by a blood disease that is shortening his life, he has some nice moments, too.
Dr. Michael Morbius has already cured himself of a similar ailment, though at the cost of turning
himself into a vampire, and for that reason has decided not to share the cure with Milo. Matt
Smith brings a sympathetic authenticity to the scene where he’s pleading with Morbius to give
him the treatment, to save his life, vampiric side effects be damned. Morbius refuses,
of course, and Milo is left there thinking, “I liked it better when the doctor was me.”
Morbius himself is played by Jared Leto, who is . . . fine. The best thing I can say about his
performance is that he stands in the center of all this nonsense, and manages to not be swallowed up
by it. He doesn’t rise above it, either, but he holds his own. Here and there his performance
feels a bit too serious, as though he doesn’t realize what movie he’s in — particularly his
later scenes opposite Matt Smith, because Smith definitely knows what movie he’s in.
It’s just difficult for me to believe that anyone responsible for greenlighting
this movie could have watched it and sincerely thought, “Oh, yeah, that was money well spent!”
If I can borrow the self-consciously grandiloquent
vernacular of a Stan Lee story title — mediocrity, thy name is Morbius!
. . . Morbiocrity? Does that work?
Of course it works! That’s the only reason anyone was talking about this
movie! The box office grosses were underwhelming,
the critical consensus was “. . . nah” — I’ve thought about this and thought about it,
and the only reason I can think of why anyone gave a shit about Morbius is that someone
tweeted “it’s morbin’ time,” and we all thought it was funny and instantly started riffing on it.
The answer to my question that I posed at the top of the video,
“What is it about Morbius that made it so memetic?” is “nothing” — at least,
nothing about the movie itself. It’s not the movie Morbius that attracted the fascination
of the internet — it’s the word — and most specifically, the first syllable of the word.
It’s as simple as that. The internet discovered that “morb” is a comedically fruitful morpheme.
. . . Morbpheme.
See?!
Adding “morb” to recognizable words and phrases — a process which I propose
ought to be called “morbification” — is fun, it’s pointless, it’s easy enough
that pretty much anyone can do it, and it can be an endless source of amusement
from morbing to night. And it has fuck-all to do with the content of the film itself.
Though I think it might have a little bit to do with the quality of the film. Like I said,
the movie isn’t good, but it also isn’t even bad in a memorable or entertaining way. And,
I think that became part of the joke. The fact that the internet became this obsessed
with memeing a movie as utterly unremarkable as Morbius only made the whole thing even funnier.
What I am still wondering about is, how will this affect Sony’s plans to continue expanding its
oddball “Spider-Man Without Spider-Man” cinematic universe? Morbius contains a couple of shoehorned
in post-credit scenes reintroducing Michael Keaton’s Vulture, a clear indication that the
studio wants to move ahead with this project. But, will the internet’s sarcastic embrace of Morbius
play into the approach taken with future movies? We’ve already seen evidence that Jared Leto is
in on the joke — will follow-ups to Morbius, if there are any, try to steer into the skid?
I kind of hope not. The folks at Sony don’t seem to understand why people were talking
about Morbius, so any attempt to capitalize on that is probably doomed to end in disaster. The
studio already tried to juice the movie’s disappointing box office performance by
re-releasing it over the summer in an effort to take advantage of Morbimania. But, the re-release
only grossed another two-hundred eighty thousand dollars, which wasn’t a surprise to most people,
because Morbimania — which I guess is what I’m calling it now — wasn’t about people wanted to see
the movie — it was about people wanting to make fun of the movie — not make fun of things that
happened in the movie, which they neither knew nor cared about, but make fun of the name of the movie
and, in a more meta sense, the fact that the movie existed and that anyone was even talking about it.
The executives at Sony found out the hard way that people talking
about your movie on Twitter doesn’t equal success.
Actually, they probably didn’t, because that assumes studio executives are capable
of learning the right lessons from the successes and/or failures of their movies,
and the history of the movie business tells a very different story.
If I had to guess, I’d say in a few years we’ll get Morbius 2: A Morb For All Seasons,
and it’ll be full of ironic, self-aware humor, and Jared Leto will actually say “It’s morbin’
time” so they can use that in the trailer, and the marketing will be heavily weighted
toward online ads to bring in the internet fans, and the movie will be an even bigger
bomb than the first Morbius because once again nobody will actually want to see it,
and it will also inspire far, far less conversation on Twitter and Tumblr, et al,
because most people will have forgotten about Morbius by then, and even those who remember
won’t feel like morbing everything in sight because they already did that,
and by then they’ll be onto some new bullshit, like making memes based on a weird face somebody
makes in the Hot Wheels movie, or complaining that the MCU’s X-Men movies are too political.
And that, my friends, is a lesson we all — Hollywood big shot or not — would do well
to learn. Morbimania is all but over now, so savor what little time it has left, because:
to morb, oh, is promised to no one.
Morbifaction is not guaranteed.