Morbius transcript
Season 1 · Episode 2. Generated automatically, so expect the odd misheard word.
Hello and welcome to the Worst Movie Podcast. I'm Ade.
And I'm Aaron and this is a podcast where we watch some of the worst movies ever made and we might find something good along the way.
Thank you for joining us for episode number two. We're in September and the theme for this month is modern messes. And we're watching some of the worst, the most virally bad movies, I guess, that have come out in the last few years. Our goal with this podcast is to watch bad movies that you may have heard of, but probably haven't seen because they've been rated very poorly.
And you probably don't know who we are. Aaron, do you want to give a little bit of background on why we're doing this podcast and who we are?
We have no credentials and no background in film. We just like to watch movies and talk about them to each other. So we figured we'd do it in podcast form.
They're letting anybody get a podcast these days and we are the definition of anybody. So hope we can entertain you a little bit along the way and learn about some bad movies. Enjoy.
That's true.
today we are going to talk about Morbius. This is a movie that came out in 2022 starring Jared Leto and Matt Smith and Adria Arjona. How do you say that? Ar- Ar- Arjona? Okay, I have butchered that. I got to fact check that in post, but yes, and directed by Daniel Espinosa. This is...
Are yama are yama?
Apologies up top.
What did you heard about this movie before, Aaron?
I was aware of it. I wasn't aware of the Morbius character beforehand, but I was already a fan of the Tom Holland, Sony Spider-Man movies and Venom. So I was kind of excited about this when it was coming out, but by the time it actually came out, I read the reviews and pretty much stayed away from that point.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think it's probably worth talking about a little bit about, we probably don't need to rehash all the stuff about Sony and Marvel, but this comes from the Sony universe, right? Where it's based on a Marvel character and there's some business relationship there obviously, but it's produced by Sony and they're kind of digging into a bunch of IP that they bought the rights to a long time ago.
and haven't fully relinquished that IP to Marvel. So this coming from the Sony universe, Morbius is streaming on Disney Plus. And for some background, I got a 15 % on Rotten Tomatoes, 1.6 rating on Letterboxd, made 168 million at the worldwide box office, but was considered a bomb. And I think found some life on streaming because everyone was talking about how bad it was.
Can you kick us off with a little bit of what's the intro or the synopsis of this movie?
The synopsis is biochemist Michael Morbius tries to cure himself of a rare blood disease, but he inadvertently infects himself with a form of vampirism instead.
get into all the kind of play by play of the movie. At the top, should let you know, spoiler alert, we're going to spoil the whole movie. It's fine, probably. If you haven't watched it by now, you probably won't watch it. Maybe you'll watch it after we talk about this, but we'll let you know kind of the highlights of what happens throughout the movie. So we're not gonna cover every single scene.
I'm going to skip the very first scene because I don't even know why it's there. Maybe we can talk about it later, but let's let's skip ahead. The movie kind of starts off with a the two the lead characters at a children's hospital in Greece. They're both they both have some weird blood disease that's never fully defined in the movie. But what do you what are your notes about the scene? What can you tell us about the scene?
The rare blood disease, they say that something's missing from their DNA like a piece of a puzzle and until they find it, the only way to stay alive is an oil change three times a day. So I guess they have to change their blood three times a day to stay alive. This scene has Jared Harris as their doctor, Emil Nicholas, who I love, Jared Harris as an actor. I think he's good at everything. So I was excited he was in it.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I first became familiar with him from Mad Men. What do you know him from the most?
Mostly Chernobyl, but also Mad Men. Yeah. So he's got this children's hospital where he's trying to take care of these troubled kids that I guess their parents just want to leave them there.
yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's great.
Yeah, it's like a boarding school
slash hospital.
Yeah, and the two kids are Michael and Lucien and Lucien is the new patient and ⁓ Michael keeps calling him Milo. Everybody who takes the bed that Lucien is in, he calls Milo. So all of these kids are Milo and they become, I guess, quick friends. There's also this weird kind of
foreshadowing where they see these like street thugs outside the hospital that they're like, you don't go outside because we're the few against the many or the Spartans in here. So there's this gang element going on outside while they're there.
Yeah.
It's a really weird setup
because we first find thugs, the two main characters, Michael and Milo are sitting in their hospital beds and this group of thugs is like pointing at the windows laughing and like mimicking the way they walk It's just like, do they just hang out there all day laughing at the poor sick kids? Like that's just...
Yeah.
You
They're in
school uniforms, so I am assuming that they're like from a nearby school, school kids
Yeah,
So there's a day where they're getting their oil change and ⁓ Milo's machine breaks for some reason and he kind of passes out and Michael freaks out and pops the side off the machine and there's like fuses inside there and he realizes one fuse is bad and he replaces it with a spring from his pen and saves Milo's life.
Which the next scene is the doctor, Emil. It's like it took a team of scientists to build that machine and you fixed it with a ballpoint pen. So he must be this gifted child. Yeah, so they said.
Yeah.
He's a genius. Yeah, just,
it seems like out of nowhere. just, it just all moves really fast. To me, it seemed like that was all the same day that Milo first came to the hospital. Like they didn't, it was just like he met him and then he saved his life. And then the doctor ships him off somewhere to learn how to become a scientist.
It did seem like
Yeah, yeah. So Michael says goodbye to Milo in a note, because I guess they're best friends now. They just met, but... And Milo loses the note outside the window, like it blows out of an open window, and so he goes out to retrieve his note, and he is assaulted by the street thugs.
Yeah.
Yeah. So anyway, it's, it's all this, it's this backstory that, lets us understand that these two characters became lifelong friends when they're in the hospital and they both have the same disease. And so the movie jumps ahead in time to, did you ever catch is Milo? What does, what does Milo do when he grows up? He seems very rich and it seems like he's funding Dr. Morbius's research, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, he is funding it, but I don't think they'd say what he does for a living.
The closest thing was at the very beginning, Michael Morbius, Jared Leto is visiting growing up Milo in his apartment or something. And there's this thug and he's like, where'd you get that guy? And he says something about winning it in a winning the thug in a poker game with an unsavory character or something like that. Did you catch that? It's like, yeah, I was like, that's just a weird. So anyway, I guess he's a very successful poker player.
No, I missed that.
who's trading people and money to buy penthouse apartments in New York City. But anyway, so the movie jumps to modern times and Dr. Morbius has turned down the Nobel Prize. which he was awarded for creating artificial blood. And they show in the lab with, before I knew who she was, I called her hot doctor. Hot doctor shows up and is like,
I know what you're doing. You're mixing human DNA and bat DNA. And then, and then he's like, yeah, you got me. I mean, this is her, this is his colleague, I guess. Anyway, and he has, he has this giant tank in the middle of his lab. That's all glass and his office is all glass. So you could, you could see people walking in the hallway so they can see inside his lab. They can see this giant tank with all these vampire bats flying around and it's been.
And like she just uncovers in the scene like, you've been messing around with bats in your blood experiments.
Yeah, it seems like she wasn't aware of any of the work he was doing or of his lab because she stumbles upon this giant bat cage in the middle of his lab that had to have taken some time to be built. I'm not quite sure what their work relationship is.
I mean, it's yeah, they show it throughout the movie. It's very prominent.
Yeah, this is jumping around a little bit. I wasn't sure what their relationship was, period. seemed like at first it seemed like she was his boss. Then it seemed like, I mean, they, they worked together at several, several points of doing science-y stuff. And, then like towards the end of the movie, they kiss in a way that it's like, there was no romance. seemed like there was no romantic tension or relationship there at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I kind of wonder if they shot like a bunch of different versions of this movie because it kind of jumps around in terms of like who she was to him.
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. She kind of is just there to drive the plot along. So she kind of fits whatever whatever they need her to be, I suppose. I like that his his passcode that she sussed out was the first six digits of pi backwards.
sure.
Yeah.
That's password he uses for everything. which I don't know. is that just to make him seem smart? But because he knows the first six digits of pi, but not so smart that he like has a better password.
Yeah.
I so.
He hasn't
figured out cyber security, but he's a brainy doctor who knows the first six digits.
Right.
Did you also catch why he turned down the Nobel Prize?
Yeah, he said it was because he couldn't accept an award for something he discovered on accident. it sounds like he was trying to cure his own disease and by chance created artificial blood, which turned out to be a useful life-saving product, but he didn't complete his goal of curing his own disease. So he didn't want the prize.
I mean, that seems, it just seemed like a weird plot point. first, I don't know a lot about science, isn't art some of our best scientific inventions, things that people found by accident, wasn't penicillin discovered by accident.
You
Yeah.
Yeah, it feels like it happens all the time. It's kind of weird, like I couldn't understand what character they were trying to give him. Like is he this humble doctor or is he creepy like spooky doctor?
Right. ⁓
Right.
Yeah, he
looks like a vampire from the start. He has like just all black and sunken face and all that. And I know he's supposed to be sickly, but yeah, the tone was really all over the place in the first 10, 15 minutes of this movie.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
So they try to give us all this backstory that doesn't make a lot of sense, but you can pretty much movie like really starts maybe, I don't know, 15 minutes in when they are in international waters. he's discovered, that one of his bat human DNA combination, serums works in mice. and there's a little bit of
exposition to say he's going to progress towards human trials, but he has to do it in international waters because it hasn't been approved by the FDA or any of, any of the, you know, authorities. So maybe take us to that scene and what happens and kind of set that up.
So it seems like Milo is funding this offshore cargo ship where they're doing these trials and he's there with his assistant and like armed guards. I don't know why they're there or why they're needed.
That was one of my notes. are like
eight armed guards walking around this ship, protecting from what?
I don't know, they seem to be aggro against the doctors, like they're holding the doctors there, but that doesn't make any sense.
No, I think they're really just there so that when Morbius turns into the vampire creature or whatever, he has somebody to attack that's not hot doctor. Yeah.
Yeah. That's not his assistant. Yeah.
Yeah. So that's basically what happened. He tried one of his sample serums out. It seemed to work for a moment and then he went full vampire mode. It started attacking these armed guards and he kills them all, drinks their blood.
Yeah.
And then he falls asleep. He wakes up as super ripped, steamy Jared Leto, shirtless. Yeah, ⁓ it's the Captain America glow up scene. ⁓ But then he sees the footage of what he's done to everyone on board. He's also attacked his assistant in the process and knocked her out. ⁓
Yeah, it goes from super skinny to super jacked.
huh.
I think one of the
thugs did that by the way. ⁓ If I caught it correctly, because it seemed like a very convenient plot point to be like, we were still sympathetic towards the doctor because he didn't actually hurt somebody we know. And then we're against the thugs so we don't feel bad that they all got murdered.
Okay
Yeah, and they had to be like unjustifiably evil for some reason. Like there was no reason for them to attack her or I don't know, do any of the things they did. They were super creepy. Like it was like sleazy. Like she's in danger even when nothing had happened yet.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he wakes up and sees what he's done and he calls in a mayday for an airlift and then he jumps overboard. So they come and tow the ship in with all of the drained bodies and the assistance.
Yeah, and then we're introduced to a pair of characters, FBI agents played by Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal. Can you think of a weirder combination of partners to play FBI agents?
No, they didn't seem appropriate at all.
They played their parts very, I mean, as you can imagine, if you've seen either of them before, Tyrese Gibson was just very like trying to act macho and monotone. Yeah. Try to act super cool. And Al Madrigal was just this like happy, cheerful comedian guy. ⁓ the jumping ahead a little bit throughout the movie, they did nothing, right? Did I catch it? They keep popping up in the wake of things that
Cool.
Yeah.
It didn't do anything.
Morbius does and the villain does, but ⁓ yeah, they do nothing.
Yeah.
I so for as much as they're in this movie, I don't really have any notes on them. They didn't really do anything.
Ha ha ha
I have a note, is, this is jumping ahead in the movie, but my favorite thing that Al Madrigal's character does is at some point they're looking for Hot Doctor. and they go to her apartment and he finds a litter box and he shakes the litter box and says, here kitty kitty, shaking the litter box. And then he's like, cat's not here. She must be gone too. And I was like, who?
Yeah.
You've never owned a cat. nobody who wrote this movie has ever owned a cat. What cat has come reliably when you say, here kitty kitty, but what cat has come at all when you shake the litter box.
Yeah, what is that enticing them with?
Yeah, exactly. but yeah, there's just weird stuff that happened with, ⁓ with those FBI agents. ⁓
Yeah, we get a sequence
where he's kind of discovering his powers here too, where he's learning about his strength. so we get that sequence after the International Waters scene.
Yeah.
And basically the whole setup is he's turned into this vampire. mean, I don't really know what he is. Basically the vampire part is he needs blood in order to continue to be jacked and survive. And so he kind of goes, he drinks his fake blood that he's invented for the non-Nobel prize. And that seems to tide him over, but really what fuels his power is real human blood.
Yeah.
red stuff, they say a couple of points in the movie his powers are super strong parkour, ⁓ flight kind of.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah,
he's like lighter than the wind. So he just kind of glides on the wind.
Yeah.
Super speed. it's, it's a weird combination of, can also, I guess, control bats. we, we learned in the boss battle. it's a very, yeah, it's, it's a very comic booky all over the place set of powers. and so as he's trying to deal with his cravings of blood, we get this creepy hallway scene where, this nurse is walking down.
Yeah.
I guess a basement in the hospital. And the setup is that every few feet, they're really trying to conserve light and energy because every, the whole hallway is dark except for where she's standing and it's motion sense. So every few feet that she walks, the previous light turns off and the next light turns on and we see a creepy figure behind her. ⁓
Yeah.
She's always
like on the edge of the darkness too. She's never felt like very well lit.
Yeah.
Yeah. I thought it was a dumb setup, but kind of worked a little bit visually. I don't know. What'd you think?
Yeah, it did feel like that was their one good idea for a really creepy scene in the movie and they're like, we gotta fit that in somehow. Like this scene where there's this unseen presence, like catching up to her from behind and you're only aware of it by the lights coming on and off. ⁓
Yeah.
Yeah, and
she starts running and then it's like this strobe-like effect where you see the figure on the wall and then on the ceiling and then kind of coming closer closer towards her.
Yeah, just
glimpses of it. it kills her and drinks her blood.
there's some tension where we're trying to, basically we think it's Morbius, the doctor that's done this and he feels a lot of remorse and the cops start coming after him. because they, at some point they say something about, they don't care about the eight people on the international water ship because they're just, at some point, one of them says something like, we don't care about the eight mercs.
he killed because they're just, they're just random hired guns, but he killed a nurse and, and she was a mother with two kids. So yeah. So the thugs are indispensable and the cops really rallied to try to find him. arrest him. Milo, his childhood friend has.
Yeah.
Yeah, I killed a citizen.
injected himself with the serum because there was a scene where Morbius didn't want to give it to Milo because he thought it was dangerous and he was like, look what I've become. it's, you know, uh, but Milo somehow gets the serum, figures out how to apply it. And he's the one who's killed the nurse. And so it's kind of set up this like, uh, Milo versus Morbius situation.
Right.
Milo's angry at Morbius for not giving him the serum, even though it was... This is, I think, the conflict that they try to set up between Milo and Morbius is that he wouldn't give it to him, and so Morbius gets to be healthy and live on, but Milo has to die because it's not safe to take or whatever.
so Morbius gets arrested for the nurse's death. Milo breaks him out of prison And by the way, Milo comes to visit him in prison, pretending to be his attorney. I have questions. One, does that work? I need to talk to an attorney at some point. Can I just be like, I'm an attorney.
Yeah.
And to go talk to a friend who's arrested, it seems like there's got to be a more formal process to that. Anyway. And then he also, he's also drinking from a flask the whole time, which I guess was blood. ⁓ But I'm, I'm pretty sure they don't let you bring that into prison. They're not just like, if they check it, I mean, I'm sure they check it and I'm sure it doesn't matter what's in it. They're, they're not like, yeah, go ahead.
Maybe.
Yeah.
You
bring that flask in.
Yeah, I'm sure you at the minimum get like a pat down and a metal detector when you're going in. I can't imagine they'd let you bring in a bag of blood like he does. A bag of human blood.
Yeah, I mean, maybe
he pretended like he needed that for that. was, I don't know. Yeah.
By the way, hot doctor's name is Martin. I've got my notes like two pages in. they interviewed Martin and she basically was like, I don't know. Maybe it was Morbius and they that's when they go to arrest him. Yeah, so Milo comes and and tells him that he doesn't deserve to be in jail. He doesn't belong there. He isn't capable of murder, and so they need to get him out in any way possible.
Okay.
And then he drops just a bag of blood on the ground as he leaves and he says to keep you going And then it's like this usual suspect scene Where he's walking out with a limp at the beginning, but as he gets further out of the prison you see he's like walking without his cane and he left his cane behind and that's He's he's taking this serum. Yeah
Yeah.
That's when Morbius realizes that Milo is strong now. Yeah.
Morbius breaks out and then the very next scene they start fighting in the streets of New York and then the subway. I don't, why are they fighting?
Yeah.
I don't know. I think because... No, I don't know.
I mean.
it seems like maybe Morbius is mad at Milo for taking the serum and becoming a monster himself. So he attacks him, but then it kind of switches and Milo starts attacking Morbius and Morbius runs away. He flies away when he discovers he can fly. Like it's very, it's, mean, there's some interesting shots, like action shots, but it, it's just kind of like they.
Yeah.
We're like, here's the set piece of these two characters fighting, but we're not really going to put much work into figuring out why they're fighting.
Yeah, I was going to say, think maybe it's because Milo killed the nurse, but we didn't. I don't think he knew that at the time. He didn't find that out until they were already fighting.
Right. Yeah, it just seems like they fight and it's like just a long enough fight to get the few minutes in the movie that we need and then he runs away.
So.
Yeah, and Morbius flies away and he jumps on a bus that Martin is also riding.
that takes us to they're talking in a coffee shop and these counterfeiters happen to walk into the coffee shop and Morbius spots them, follows them to their underground counterfeiting lab and he steals. ⁓ yeah. That's another superpower. he follows them with a super hearing and goes down and steals the lab.
he has super hearing, by the way. He has super hearing.
from these counterfeiters and turns this counterfeiting operation into a DNA sequencing lab. Neither of us are scientists, but what do you think the overlap of equipment is for counterfeiting and DNA sequencing?
Yeah.
Hahaha
I don't know, I just loved the scene of him fixing up all of this left behind random equipment to make it spin blood vials and stuff. was...
Yeah, he breaks down a printer and makes it into
I mean, I guess he is the guy who as a 10 year old or whatever, fix that machine that it took a team of scientists and he fixed it with a pen. So maybe maybe that was the setup we needed to believe this scene.
Yeah.
Yeah, he basically makes a medical-grade lab out of what looks like a printer and some counterfeiters' equipment in an abandoned mall.
Yeah.
yeah. And so he starts working in this lab with a hot doctor. I forgot a name already. ⁓ to, build a, I guess something to kill Milo. And he says, what he says, it's something that's lethal to bats and fatal to humans. that's like, okay, that's a weird,
Martin.
You
That's very specific. and so he's working on that lab. Meanwhile, Milo is killing other people throughout the city.
I could just be bleach. I'm pretty sure bleach is lethal to bats and humans. I don't think you need a lab.
Ha ha.
I mean, there's so many things that are lethal to both mass and humans. Again, I'm not a scientist or, or any sort of zoologist.
Yeah, exactly. I would, I would think a bullet would work, but you know, yeah, he could. Yeah. So he has to think of something. I mean, it's still a projectile that he has to something that he has to get into the villain. don't know. a sword maybe. ⁓ anyway.
He's faster than bullets,
Yeah,
anything really.
Yeah.
Yeah. You don't need something medical. This is a meanwhile, by the way, that the FBI people are tracking Milo and try to figure out they think they're tracking Morbius, but they're really tracking Milo. And at one point Al Magical's character says something about how the average male has 12 pints of blood.
And he said something like, that's, that's like 36 beers. And he said something to, uh, um, the other cop, like, when's the last time you had any beers? Do you remember that exchange? It was just so weird. Like non-first of all, mean, 12 pints is not 36 beers. And then it was like, I don't know, just this dialogue to set up. I don't know if it was just ad libbed or whatever. When's the last time you had any beers? Like.
Vaguely.
like the cops sober and what does that have to do with the story anyway?
They really
needed some dialogue to fluff out the runtime.
Yeah, exactly. That's, that's kind of what, what it seemed like. so yeah, there are a bunch of different scenes like Milo and the, their, their doctor, like Milo nearly kills the doctor. Right. Um, and well, he.
tax them yeah
Milo
watches Morbius and Martine kiss on the roof of their lab, which...
Yeah. Which
again, it was like, where, where did that like, why? And then it all leads to eventually, yeah, Milo nearly killing hot doctor. that leads to the boss battle of, Milo and Morbius. yeah. Do you want to walk through that a little bit?
Why?
Well, I just had a note about some of the scenes that we skipped over is Morbius is a lot of the time trying to be incognito, inconspicuous when he's out in public, but he wears the most conspicuous clothing. He's a full black outfit and he dramatically flips his hood up as he walks away. Everywhere he goes is the most dramatic, conspicuous way he could do it.
Yeah.
Ha ha ha.
If he's going for gray man, like blend in type disguise, he completely failed. He's gone full vampire disguise.
Yeah.
Yeah, he looks like a vampire.
Yeah, if you're looking for
a vampire, he's the obvious vampire in the room. there was also a scene where Martine gets a paper cut on her finger and Morbius is like almost at the edge of losing control. Like he he's like, you need to close that up now because she's she's bleeding in the room with him. But.
Yeah.
Strangely, when he arrives to find Dr. Nicholas slashed open by Milo, he has no urging. Yeah, he's not tempted by that at all. He's got a huge chest wound. And so, yeah, anyway, it's kind of convoluted how we get there.
He's not tempted.
he arrives as Martina's dying and she like sexily says that he needs to make her death worth it. And so they kiss and she bites him or something and bites him and draws his blood. And then he consumes her blood, I guess.
Yeah, she bites his lip.
He goes in and drinks her blood.
Yeah, I mean, this is so.
It was very sexy for for what was happening and it felt weird because they.
And
it didn't make any sense why she bit him and drank his blood. mean, so right before the credits hit, she like wakes up and I guess we're meant to believe that her drinking his blood saved her life. Right. But in the moment, it doesn't make any sense why she's drinking. You're not going to like in death, like as you're dying, just think, maybe I should drink.
No.
turned her into a vampire.
his blood. So it might save my life. I don't know. It would have made more sense if he gave her some of his blood to try to save her. But yeah, I don't know that the whole. Yeah, science, science.
Yeah.
It's pseudoscience at best. So it leads to this fight where Milo is just straight kicking Morbius' ass all over the place. Also, Milo's in like this pinstripe suit for the whole fight and it just seems like campy. It's very campy. I feel like the Milo performance itself was very campy. ⁓
Yeah.
He played
it very over the top.
Yeah, so it was unintentionally funny at times.
Yeah, I felt like this boss battle fight, the first fight, their first fight in the subway was like kind of cool and interesting because it was a time where I think they were both trying to figure out their powers and it was shot. I mean, I'm not going to say it it's not like the top 25 percentile action sequence I've seen or anything, but it wasn't, it wasn't bad. The boss battle was like some of the worst CGI that you can imagine in a movie.
Like it was just basically two animated characters fighting and you couldn't tell where they were besides just above ground or below ground.
Yeah.
It was like full CG Harry Potter in the Quidditch match where there's no real human acting going on, it's just all drawn.
Yeah.
Yeah. And then what did you think about the finale of the boss battle? How he finally stops getting... Yeah.
He summons the bats.
He summons the power of the bats and directs them towards Milo and they pin him down, I guess. They start ripping at him and that gives him the edge that he needs to go deliver the poison serum and kill Milo.
Do you think these are the vampire bats from the lab or are these just bats from all around the city?
I have no idea. They just seem to come out of the ground. So I don't know that they were his lab bats. I think he just, he communes with all bats and he can call them.
Yeah.
his ultimate.
Yeah, he's not very powerful for like he got his ass kicked like other than the bats coming and pinning down his opponent like he had he had no moves.
Yeah, and then after Morbius kills Milo, Martine wakes up as a vampire and Morbius flies away on the wind.
Yeah. And, so he had, he had created two anti-serums and the implication was that he was going to kill Milo and then he was going to kill himself because he couldn't deal with the cravings of needing human blood and obviously killing people to get it. But he doesn't kill himself at the end. He, and they don't really explain that. Did you catch anything about that or what'd you think?
Right.
Yeah.
No, I
think he just decides he's gonna just kill bad guys and that's justifiable. So, I don't know. They don't explain his character very well for his motivations. We do get a little bonus scene right at the end where there's a multiverse ripple in the sky and Michael Keaton as Vulture appears.
Yeah, I guess.
in a jail cell. He appears in jail and they are like, who are you? You don't belong here because he's not in his own universe. And so they release him from jail. And so now Vulture is in just a little MCU Sony crossover, I guess, but it ultimately doesn't lead anywhere as far as I know.
Right.
Yeah.
And then there's the post credits scene where Morbis goes out to meet Vulture in the desert or something and he's like, we should team up.
Morbius says sounds interesting.
Do you care about that stuff at all? was just like, I mean, I watched a decent number of the Marvel movies, I kind of vaguely knew who Michael Keaton's character was, but I had to look it up and be like, okay, these two in the comics are part of the Sinister Six against Spider-Man and all that. But it was just like, at this point, I'm just like, I don't.
give a shit about any of this like, you know, teasing towards future movies that are going to come out five years from now or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was interested when it seemed like we might get Venom and Spider-Man crossover into the MCU, but like, I could not care less about Vulture and Morbius teaming up.
Right, and this wasn't the movie to get y'all jazzed up about what's gonna happen.
No.
This was kind of when peak movie, comic book movie fatigue was on setting for me, I think.
Right.
Yeah. We're still probably there, but yeah, this was trying to follow that template that MCU set a decade ago and more to try to get us excited about the next movies. So anyway, that's the movie. Anything that we missed from the movie before we get into kind of analysis, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I loved Jared Leto's pseudoscience exposition at the beginning when he was explaining how he was going to mix bat DNA with human DNA and how they produce this enzyme. so he's got a drink of blood or whatever, but he delivers it so seriously about how it's the next step of evolution and all this stuff that it was so unintentionally funny. I feel like he is a
He's trying really hard to be mysterious in this movie and it's just humorous most of the time. Yeah. What about you?
It didn't work for you. Yeah. ⁓
I'm looking through my notes. I, I wrote down who feeds the lab bats. They just, they're just flying around to that tank for, I guess several, I can't remember how long this, this movie, what, period of time this movie spans. It's at least several days, if not a few weeks, but we see various points. He goes back, he breaks back into the lab and.
Hahaha
and so forth. Yeah, they're just flying around like this, know, whipping around and it's just this glass tank. There's no vegetation, no water, no food and ⁓ they're those vampire bats are very active.
constantly flying.
Yeah.
gotta be expensive to get him all those mosquitoes and crickets
Yeah. And
yeah, we don't, we don't see, I I guess like in many movies, we don't really see the whole staff of this lab. just see, Morbius and a hot doctor. there's gotta be some intern somewhere that's collecting insects and feeding them.
There must be.
What hot takes do you have about this movie?
don't know that I have any hot takes. just couldn't get past why Milo was the villain. Like what were his motivations for behaving the way he behaved? don't know why they were fighting. They were lifelong best friends and something happened to make them want to kill each other. I don't get it.
Right
Yeah, that was probably my biggest problem with the movie it made sense why Milo wanted the serum to turn him into a vampire. It made sense why Morbius didn't want him to have it because he felt like it was dangerous and he didn't want to deal with, you know, he didn't want his friend to deal with the need, having to need human blood. But yeah, it didn't seem to make sense why like,
Right.
especially since they're lifelong friends, I would have just sat down and say, okay, let's talk this through and figure out how we're going to compromise or move forward with us both being vampires. I guess, yeah.
develop a new serum that
doesn't do this.
Exactly. Yeah, just you could work on it a little bit. Yeah, it didn't have to escalate so quickly. So would you imagine you were that character? Would you would you drink the serum?
Milo? If I was Milo?
Yeah, yeah,
or Morbius or whatever.
If I was Morbius, definitely. the first time you don't know what it's gonna do. After I already knew what it did, I think I would still, if I'm Milo, think I would still do it. It's like either that or die, I guess. like, I would take it.
Yeah.
And it seems like you'd be able to figure out, they never even once tried like pig's blood. It was like, they were just like artificial blood or human blood. And.
Yeah,
he just says it like that. He's he has an undeniable craving for human blood specifically. Like how do you know that it's human blood that you want so badly?
Can you just like go try apes or monkeys and see if like that's close enough? Like it doesn't have to go that far, I guess. I mean, you can actually get human blood too. Can't you just like start robbing blood banks? You don't have to kill people.
Yeah.
You can get blood if you want blood. It doesn't have to be human.
Also true, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't know all the places where you can get blood, but yeah, it seems like you'd and yeah, you're super rich. You could just start your own blood bank and be like, I'll pay everybody. I'll pay you a thousand bucks for each pint of blood.
Yeah, I'm sure Milo can set up some sort of foundation for donating blood to.
Yeah, do you know anything about Morbius in the comics? Like is he like a Dexter type character where he's just killing bad guys for their blood?
I don't know. I get the impression he's meant to be an anti-hero, like Punisher or something. But yeah, don't really know anything about the Morbius character, so I was not super excited when this was announced anyway. I don't know. I'm not the guy to ask, I guess. I am just a regular man after all.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
You're not a vampire. That's good to know
I'm not a movie expert.
⁓ yeah. Okay. Okay. yes. You're not a, you're not a
Mar Marvel junkie. yeah. Marvel expert. ⁓ yeah, I, felt like the movie had a lot of potential. This kind of gets into verdict, but this is kind of my hot take, I guess is like, I, I felt like it just touched on some themes that could make this super interesting. Like
Yeah. Yeah.
They try to create this tension around, would you save your own life if it meant you had to kill others? you know, the whole decision about Milo taking the serum, would you kill yourself, you know, and drink the anti serum if, you know, to, to, to save others. And then just that, yeah, I guess some of the things that Morbius was wrestling with, it seemed like it could have been a really interesting movie.
the whole Jekyll Hyde type situation that he was in where he kept transforming. And yeah, it just like, I kind of felt like if it, if they did like 10 minutes of reshoots and edits, it could have actually been not a great movie, but like a mediocre movie.
Yeah.
Yeah, if they had just committed to any one of those questions and like explored it, it would have been a better movie than what you got.
Right.
Yeah, I felt like it was just so close, so close. Yeah, so I guess that, mean, what did you, what's your verdict that gets into the, what did you think of the movie?
I didn't hate it. I thought it took itself way too seriously. I don't know if this is like a Sony Marvel thing or maybe it's comic book movies in general, but it was unintentionally funny because of how serious they took it and they were trying to deliver this serious, dark comic book movie and it was just kind of cringy. I felt like it didn't commit to
Right.
A genre either like it couldn't decide if it was going to be a campy. Comic book movie or if it was horror or action. I know that. A lot of people had issues with the CG, but I thought it was fine like I thought that the look of the movie overall was good like I I like the visuals vibe. But yeah, the plot was definitely thin. It felt longer than it was, but.
Yeah, yeah, I thought it was solid.
other parts felt completely rushed, like the motivations of Milo at the end. And I think that it's deserving of all of the memes that it got. But it's a mostly forgettable airplane movie. Like, it's not offensively bad. It's just bad.
Yeah
Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. It's not. It's it was better than I expected, which my expectations were, you know, very, very low, given how much criticism there was around it. I actually thought Jared Leto was. Not bad in it. Like he was pretty good. I was expecting him to be terrible because I thought his Joker from whenever that was Suicide Squad was terrible. Yeah. And,
Suicide Squad. Yeah.
I just expected.
This felt closer to his Blade Runner character.
Yeah, which I liked him in Blade Runner. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, I was expecting him to be not good because a lot of he I think he bore brunt of the criticism. I'm not saying it was Oscar-worthy performance or anything like that. But yeah, I thought it was I thought there were elements that were fine. It was just the movie itself was kind of a mess. Like the writing was kind of a mess. And I think, you know, I think there's a good movie for for this podcast because it was
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
It's a movie where it was rated really poorly, I think, especially because the expectations were so high, given the budget of this movie and its place in the Sony universe and all that stuff.
And with the success that they'd had up to that point with the Spider-Man movies, and I thought the Venom movies were good too, like I was expecting this to be at least interesting, but yeah.
Right. Right.
Yeah. So, um, yeah. So not, not good, not, uh, I think I gave it, uh, maybe two stars on letterbox, maybe one and a half. can't remember. Um, yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't the worst I've seen, but not good. What, what are your alternate picks? we like to pick a movie or two, um, or a few movies from the same directors, same actors, same theme.
What are your alt pics for this movie?
So I've got a few actually. It has a good cast this movie. Didn't do very much with it. But Adria Arjona is in True Detective, which I liked. She's also prominently in Andor, which I love. I love Andor. She's really good in it. Blade Runner 2049 for Jared Leto or Requiem.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, haven't seen that yet.
Matt Smith. I'm not a Doctor Who person, but if you like Matt Smith, watch Doctor Who, I guess. ⁓ Or The Crown, he was in the later seasons of The Crown. And then Jared Harris, I think, is my favorite actor in this, and he was in Chernobyl, Mad Men, Man from Uncle, which I think still deserves a sequel. yeah, those are my alt picks.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good list. I didn't have much else that wasn't on your list, yeah, specifically Jared Leto, Requiem for a Dream was one of my all-time favorite movies. And also Shout Out to Fight Club, another one of my all-time favorite movies.
I think that's all that I can say about Morbius. Anything else you've got?
That's it.
All right, I'm Ade.
I'm Aaron. Thanks for listening to the worst movie podcast.