By Ruchika Seneviratne
On Wednesday, the 30th of March, we were invited for an advance screening of ‘Morbius’ at the Scope Cinemas Multiplex – CCC Dolby Atmos theatre. It was an evening show at 7.10 pm in the Dolby Atmos theatre. The whole area was packed with people who waited in excitement for the movie to unfold.
Talking about the movie, Dr. Michael Morbius is a new character introduced to the Universe, or rather, the Multiverse of Spiderman and this movie served up the story and the origin of this vampire/ human hybrid anti-hero. It was a bit of a typical superhero story with an experiment that went wrong and gave him uncontrollable superpowers, this time in the form of vampirism. In the comics, Morbius is considered to be one of the most intriguing and compelling characters in all of Spiderman but the movie adaptation brought out that aspect of the character very poorly. It was very fast paced, action packed and quite exhilarating but from a cinematic perspective, it was very bland and uninspiring. The development of the story and the climactic points felt very forced and failed to captivate us as much as they would have hoped for.
The performances of the characters were also very mediocre. The movie starred Jared Leto as Michael Morbius and comprised of a star studded cast of Matt Smith, Adria Arona, Tyrese Gibson, Jarred Harris and Al Madrigal. But the one who stole the show for me, personally was Matt Smith, as Lucien ‘Milo’. It was a great performance from the Englishman and him, along with Agent Rodriguez (Al Madrigal) were almost singlehandedly responsible for the comedy element of this movie.
As I mentioned earlier, this movie is part of the ‘Spiderverse’ so it is definitely a part of something bigger and this movie was simply just laying the foundation for this particular character. This is an interesting approach from Marvel to introduce the characters. Perhaps, the Venom movie might have been the trigger for this strategy but, they should be wary of not making these movies seem like 2nd tier films from the likes of Spiderman: No Way Home and the upcoming Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder because currently, it does feel like that.
But, what managed to make this experience a great one was the service offered. The Dolby Atmos surround sound system was simply sensational and simply lit up the movie, especially the action scenes. It was truly a unique and awesome experience. We also got the Cheesy flavoured and the Nacho Mexican flavoured popcorn before the movie and both were so good! We had to exercise caution not to finish the popcorn before the movie even began.
An important note to all who are going to watch this movie is that there are two end credit scenes containing a surprise character from before 🙂