It's the Sony SpiderVerse 3.0! Or whatever.
Despite all the numeours bad reviews, I was actually willing to give Morbius a shot... on Netflix, of course, I wasn't going to spend money to see it in theaters. And now that it's been streaming for a week, I figure I can talk about the whole ordeal.
I'm not going to review the movie. Suffice to say it's not horrendous, but it's far from good. There's numerous idiotic story beats that make less than zero sense... and they use time jumps not to be clever and interesting, but to appear clever and interesting. Alas, they only serve to convolute the compressed stream of yet another stupid origin story that nobody asked for. Why they couldn't have just picked up after Jared Leto had been Morbin' for a while, gave us an interesting adversary, and spent five minutes recapping his useless origin in some way that was actually clever and interesting... well... that might have worked.
And now I am going to discuss a heavy spoiler (if you can call it that) for one of the "shocking" events in the film.
The post-credit madness has The Vulture (Adrian Toomes played by Michael Keaton) disappear from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and reappear in the Sony SpiderVerse. FOR NO REASON AT ALL. Doctor Strange's spell in the MCU returned everybody to their own universe, but this iteration of The Vulture didn't originate in the Sony SpiderVerse, so I have no idea what in the hell they were thinking.
I have less a problem with The Vulture wanting to team up with Morby to defeat Spider-Man... nobody in the MCU remembers that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, including Toomes, so him wanting to destroy the guy who destroyed his life and sent him to prison back in the MCU makes sense. Except it really doesn't. Toomes has a family back in the MCU. He has no beef with the Spider-Man in Morbius's universe. So why wouldn't he focus on getting back to his family instead of some useless vendetta against somebody who had done nothing to him? It's like... holy shit. Did the Morbius writers think about this crap for even two seconds?
Apparently not.
Which kills me, because Toomes did the right thing in the end, but that was erased for nothing more than Sony trying to sponge off Marvel Studios hard work.
Which means that it's just one more shitty take on Morbius for this embarrassing fucking movie.
Sony should either A) Sell the rights for Spider-Man to Marvel Studios... or B) Just sit back and collect the profits on the MCU Spider-Man movies, which don't suck.
But of course they won't do any of those things because they'd rather keep hoping they hit the jackpot... even though they are doing very little to ensure that actually happens.
I didn't get any sleep last night, so this will undoubtably be a barely coherent edition of Bullet Sunday...
• Discriminated. Everybody is discriminated against at some point. And some people definitely get it worse than others. And while I'm sure progress is being made every day, every once in a while I hear something so outrageous that it makes me question if we've not reached a point where that progress is running backwards. Today was one of those days, because I received an email from a friend who filled me in on his recent bout with discrimination. It's all at once disgusting and disappointing, made even more so because he has no recourse. I have faith that eventually the human race can live together without prejudice. We have to, or we perish. But that day keeps getting further and further away to me, and I can't help but feel overwhelming sadness because of it.
 
• Bear TV. I want this...
Awww... It's a television that you can snuggle with after you're done watching him!
 
• Disc. In the continuing effort to convert my analogue life into digital 1's and 0's, I've been having all my old photo negatives and paper pictures scanned. I'm probably 80% there. The problem is that it's going to be a long road to reaching 100%. Some media, in particular 110 Black & White negatives and Kodak's infamously crappy Disc Film, are really expensive to have done right...
I don't know why I ever bought into the technology. Probably because the camera was so small and easy to load. Unfortunately, those conveniences necessitated tiny negatives which produced crappy photos. I only used the stupid thing for less than two years, but they were two very important years... Thus my junior year of high school: Disc. My first trip to New Orleans: Disc. My senior year of high school: Disc. Fortunately my parents bought me a 35mm Canon A-1 for graduation so I was set after that. But right now... my past belongs to Disc. Will digital be forever?
 
• Pushed. When I read about a movie that features super-powered psychics battling it out in Hong Kong... well... it's not like I can pass that up. I didn't even bother to look at the reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes, I just add it to my NetFlix queue and watched it when the DVD arrived. Only to discover that it's one of the stupidest, most needlessly incoherent and incomprehensible messes I've ever seen. The entire film was nothing more than a set up for a sequel, but it sucked so horrendously bad that there probably isn't going to be a sequel. That leaves us with a half-finished disaster that's sometimes pretty to look at, but has paper-thin characters and a patchwork story that ends up being a pale imitation of Scanners. When the hell are filmmakers going to understand that you make the best movie you can... THEN worry about a sequel? The sad thing here is that the concept is so cool. But this piece of EPIC FAIL! will undoubtedly kill any hope of a great film of this kind being made for quite a while.
 
And that will have to be it for this edition of Bullet Sunday... I don't think I can make it through two nights in a row without sleep.