Reel Entropy

1/10 Morbius would be an absolute disaster if approached as a completed movie, but the reality of it is worse. Despite having been initially slated for release way back in July 2020, the theatrical release is obviously a work in progress, and it looks like no one ever intended to complete it.

Manhattan- Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Michael Morbius (Jared Leto, who also produces executively) searches for a cure to his extremely rare congenital blood – or DNA? I don’t know what’s going on – disease, so rare I guess it doesn’t have even a fictional name. In his desperation, he goes out onto the ocean and performs a dangerous experiment on himself, filling in the gaps of his DNA with that of a vampire bat and becoming a horrifying pseudo-vampire who must consume human blood multiple times a day in order to survive. Morbius, a medical doctor, is wracked with guilt over his condition, a conflict that only deepens when his “cure” is appropriated by his surrogate and/or legally adopted brother who suffers from the same disease, a difficult-to-identify character played by Matt Smith.

Morbius is one of the most disorganized theatrical cuts I’ve ever seen. It appears to have been cobbled together from footage of several different drafts of the movie – you see this all the time at the screenplay level, with different versions of a script built on top of each other, and that usually turns out fine, but this looks like it happened at the production level. Different scenes of Morbius appear to have been produced for completely different versions of the movie at different times and then mashed together, and it looks like nobody went through to iron it out. This feels less like a finished movie and more like a rough cut with samples of different approaches for a producer to look at, then send back for more editing. The movie is full not only of shifts in filmmaking style, quality and tone, but surface-level continuity contradictions and gaps of basic scene-to-scene information.