Your Brain On Morbius: why Jared Leto should stick to fiddling with his cult

 So I've been doing the October Horror Movie Challenge for the second year in a row, and I figured I should start with a classic I hadn't seen yet, so I watched The Omen. And if you've seen that film, you'll know one of the most dramatically important characters, Father Brennan, is played by Patrick Troughton, aka the Second Doctor. And thus a theme suggested itself, and for the past week I've been watching horror movies featuring performances from actors who have played Doccy Who. Eventually, because you only get up to about sixteen Doctors even if you include non-lineal ones like Peter Cushing (though he's a nice guy to have in your back pocket for a challenge like this), we'll pan out to include some actors who've played Timelords other than the Big D, but that won't be for, oooh, at least another couple of days. In that process I've watched some of the undisputed classics of the horror canon: the aforementioned Omen, the Frank Langella Dracula, Alien (featuring War Doctor John Hurt), 28 Days Later. I also watched a terrible, no good, really bad fake movie about the Borley Rectory haunting which I am going to have to write about for reasons other than the Challenge or the fact Colin Baker is in it (and which may well end up being the piece of writing which finally gets me slotted), but I am not going to write about any of these movies today. 

No, today I am going to write about 2022's internet meme sensation, Morbius. 

Memes. Memes are cool.

The first thing to be said is that this is not going to be a redemptive reading of Morbius. Morbius is a bad film. At times it is an absolutely terrible film: the final fight scene between Jay Leto's Morbs and Matt Smith's Milo, or rather between their digital avatars, consists of both characters hitting each other with the Special Moves from the Injustice games which smash through the scenery so they wind up fighting against a totally different background. Eventually Leto builds up his special meter sufficiently and unleashes his Super Sonar Thunder Combo to take Milo out. This is the dramatic climax the whole film has been building to, and it's risible. Even more so than superhero movie endings often are.

One of the few bright spots in the movie is Matt Smith's performance as Milo, a sort of mirror image of the protagonist who decides that being a vampire is actually fun and sets out to enjoy it, which immediately makes him a more compelling character than Leto's Morb-me-boy, who spends most of his time doing the traditional Reluctant Vampire thing of trying to find ways of consuming blood (or blood-type substances) which don't involve treating the entire human population like pouches of Capri-Sun. It isn't quite as bad as Thor: Love and Thunder, a film which seemed bafflingly unaware of the fact that Christian Bale's Gorr the God Butcher is its actual protagonist, but it's close. In fact, it's worth interrogating just why Matt Smith walks away with this movie stuffed inside his coat while Leto is left flailing about like an Imperial stormtrooper too thick to notice a dude has four legs. 

I mean, on one level, that's pretty obvious: Matt Smith is a very good actor, and Jared Leto isn't even a good one. But hang on, how can I say Leto is a bad actor (I mean, easily: he has a literal cult, and then there's all the Lookout Mountain stuff, but we mean 'bad actor' in a somewhat different sense)? He's been in loads of films. Well yeah, but he's not in those films because of any redeeming qualities as an actor. He is in those films because of what he is good at, which is being a performer. Specifically, in his case, a rock performer. And, in fact, what makes him such a good performer is the same thing which fatally limits him as an actor: he very obviously wants people to look at him, all the time, to the exclusion of anything else. 

The Vietnamese Morbs poster is pretty tight tho

This is an extremely helpful character trait for a rockstar, because in that field of performance getting everyone to look at you is kind of your job. Sure, sure, yeah, 'it's about the music' mate, but I can't help but notice it's much easier to bring your music to people's attention if you happen to be pretty. The visuals are a massive part of rock. And I will concede that Leto is very good at this: he's easy on the eye (or would be if his own eyes didn't have that, well, smirking Damien quality to them) and he can obviously acquit himself well enough to sell millions of Thirty Seconds to Mars records (though it's worth remarking here that a friend of mine, the poet Genevieve Walsh, tells me she once saw said band at a festival and was far from impressed, and also thought they were called Fifty Mice on the Moon, which for my money is a much better band name). 

The trouble comes when you take that sensibility and try to put it in a supposedly realistic movie. I'm not talking kitchen sink here, obviously: Morbius is a movie where being a vampire is a real thing which gives you super-strength, bat-sonar and the ability to surf wind currents. But it also grounds all of this in the supposedly mundane world of the modern superhero picture, in which supervillain fights make baristas late for their shift at Starbuck's. This isn't a genre like musical theatre, where characters frequently break the fourth wall to address songs to the audience - Hawkeye may have got a big musical number with The Avengers into its story, but that was diegetically a musical the characters in the 'real' world of that story were watching (The Boys does something similar with The Seven's fictionalised movie adventures). The point is that we are supposed to believe in the world of Michael Morbius and Milo as a real world, and one with which they are involved. And the thing about the real world is that actually very few people act as if they want everyone to be watching them all the time. 

Oh yeah, that's why Mick Jagger is better in Performance than any of the other films he's been in. 

And so the thing which makes Leto compelling as a rock performer makes him much less so in a dramatic context, because it prevents him from fully engaging with the world of the story. Matt Smith, however, always seems to be a real part of this film's world. His struggles as a disabled man have a believability which Leto's showy crutchwork just never achieves: you get the sense that it really hurts Milo to be forced to cut himself off from the world so much, to see the good things other people take for granted pass him by. And you root for him when he drinks his friend Michael's serum and starts vamping it up because it's nice to see this guy whose suffering you were so convinced by earlier having a good time. There is a reason that scene of Smith boogying on down as he enjoys his new, stronger vampire body has become a meme, and that's because of the sheer joy of seeing him enjoy it. Contrast this with the first scene in which we see Leto's improved vampire abdominals, when he turns to camera and adopts a blank expression, his torso straight on to the viewer. His new body is there to be admired. Smith's body is something to use and enjoy. 

The effect is that every other character in the film, from Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal's wisecracking cops to Adria Arjona's Dr Martine Bancroft to, especially, Jared Harris as Morbs and Milo's mentor, seems to be a person engaged in the world of the story, while Morbius - the protagonist, remember - seems to be directing everything he does, everything he says, and every attitude he strikes at some force outside of the film he wants, desperately, to be loved by. 

There's a scene in which the Morbster tells Bancroft that he cannot bring himself to drink human blood, and will in fact end his existence with the special vampire poison he cooks up (which, remember, he's going to use to murder his best friend) should the artificial blood he invented during the opening credits no longer satisfy his cravings for 'the red'. And you know that if Matt Smith had this scene he would really sell the suffering this should cause. Look, I've been suicidal, and the thing about suicide is that even when you're planning to do it, thinking of committing suicide is an upsetting thing. The body wants to live, and that alone is a source of both frustration and trauma. But feeling suicidal as a disabled person - the times when you feel you are such a burden to others that suicide is something you will have to pursue, in the manner of a climber cutting their line to save their comrades - is pure Hell. Morbius should be crying in this scene, he should be giving away his vampire strength when he punches walls in frustration, he should be distraught and inconsolable. Instead, he simply tells Bancroft the situation matter-of-factly: not because he's numbly resigned to his decision, but because he isn't really talking to her: he's talking to us, reassuring us of his good guy bona fides. In fact, this scene, and one near the start of the movie in which Bancroft berates him for 'dissing the Nobel prize committee', reminded me of nothing so much as Neil Breen, the master of the 'tell, don't show' genre of bad filmmaking. That is not something you usually want your seventy-five million dollar movie to evoke. 

Now that's more like it!

Well okay, smart girl, if Leto is such a bad actor, why has he been in so many movies then? Because Hollywood doesn't really care if movies are any good as long as lots of people come to see them. And Leto's rockstar career means he comes pre-equipped, from a Hollywood point of view, with a bunch of people who will pay to see him. Whether all these people turned out or not (and they might not have, as recent revelations about Leto's behaviour have turned a lot of people off him), they weren't enough to save Morbius from becoming officially the biggest flop of the summer. While the character himself might return (Sony's parallel Spiderverse movies are clearly, after all, working towards an Avengers-style Sinister Six team-up, most likely putting the spectacular foes in conflict with ol' web-head), it seems unlikely that this film will get an actual sequel. There ain't gonna be no rematch. 

Or, at least, there ain't gonna be no Morbius sequel. But retcon Milo's death and give us a movie where Matt Smith farts about for ninety minutes as a lovable vampire rogue? Now that I could go for.