Hello everyone, let’s talk about some low hanging fruit.
Well okay, lets just say I didn’t see this movie for the meme. I saw this movie, in theatre’s, with my husband, with sincerity and was, confused.
So I won’t go over all the problems with the movie. Like the pacing, the scene structures, the variability of the characters capability and let’s go over what I think is wrong with this movie.
This is a super hero movie, that did not need a villain.
Now of course, that isn’t to say Matt Smith wasn’t a character in that role. Given, that may just be that it’s clear he’s the only person in this movie having ANY fun being there. It’s just that, Milo, or Lucius, his actual name, not necessary for this film.
Morbius the living vampire has a very classic monster trope built in from his inception. What do you do when you’re a good person but you have to hurt people to survive?
I think they do that semi-well in the whole fake blood versus real blood dynamic, honestly though, they could have paced that better with him only being a threat when using real blood but I digress.
The conflict of the movie is baked in. How do you deal with a situation where you must hurt people to survive? It’s a very real moral quandary that a lot of people cannot really pin. It’s a story that plays out in warzones, during famines and times of hardship. What’s more important, your own health or that of the people you must hurt? It’s a fascinating question that has a lot of depth.
But Sony instead had to have a big superhero fight with lots of weird CGI and the whole oh this is a dark reflection of what he could become.
Again, Matt Smith, most fun character in the movie, but unnecessary. They could have cut out that plot entirely and replaced it with, anything. A natural disaster, an attack on a hospital by a nameless villain organization, or any easily replaceable threat. Morbius’s conflict isn’t that he needs a villain to fight, it’s that he needs to hold back on his instincts to not kill.
I think they handled that whole thing best in the Doctor Strange movie, (the original, not MoM), where he freaks the fuck out about the idea that he killed someone. He’s a doctor, he took the oath to do no harm, that’s a moral conflict. If they focused less on the whole spectacle of having a dark reflection and more on the real moral quandary, I think this movie could have been better. Not great, but better.
Thanks for listening.
Lynette.