Venom

This was a movie, a superhero story, and Intellectual property that I never really had an interest in seeing. I'm not saying it couldn't have been a good movie, I just don't know enough about Venom to say what that looks like or why I would relate to it. My only exposure to Venom prior to this movie was this guy...

That was a flaming pile of hot garbage and there was nothing about the lead up to this film (trailers, marketing, press releases) that suggested that this iteration of Venom was going to be much better. I mean I love Tom Hardy, but when he and the director both say that there is a cut of this movie that they're very excited about, that almost certainly translates to this movie is going to be bad.

So I went in with low expectations and boy was that the right choice....

Venom follows the story of Eddie Brock (played by Tom Hardy). He is a reporter who loses everything, his job, his fiance (played by Michelle Williams) breaks up with him, and his reputation is in tatters when he reports on a billionaire scientist named Carlton Drake (played by Riz Ahmed).

But then he is given the opportunity to blow the story wide open again and goes into the lab of Drake. There he finds that Drake is experimenting on human subjects to fuse them with an alien substances called a symbiote.

Of course, something goes wrong and Eddie ends up with the symbiote inside him. After that he starts hearing voices, gets incredibly hungry, and has the urge to bite people's heads off. He discovers that the symbiote is sentient and calls itself Venom.

The rest of the movie is a hot mess of Eddie forming a relationship with Venom, trying to figure out if this symbiote is something he wants in his body at all, and ultimately to stop the devious plot of Carlton Drake.

And oh boy is this movie the definition of a good bad movie. If you want coherent story arcs, characters, and serious acting, I hear A Star is Born is pretty good. But if you want quite simply a weird ass movie, Venom is almost worth the price of admission... almost.

By far the best part of the movie is the relationship between Venom and Eddie. Venom is more of a character than I really thought he was gonna be and him and Eddie do create a bit of a bond by the end of the film. It's often rushed and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially as they transition into the third act, but there are surprisingly more jokes and comedic banter between these two then I originally thought. I can't be sure if its the dynamic that fans of the comic were expecting between these two, but I had fun  with it and it was surprising to see a buddy-cop relationship come from an oddball like Eddie Brock and demon voice Venom. I chuckled a lot and while some of it really wasn't done that well, I enjoyed it.

I feel like they could have gone a little more over the top with some of the ways  they could have used the symbiotes. For example, there's a point where the Venom symbiote enters a small little purse dog, that could have been a really great moment. I'll talk more about the tone that was set up and how it almost felt unintentional, but I think if they knew they were striking that tone, the symbiote would have been used in much cleverer ways and it could have been a lot more fun than I think it accidentally was.

I was really disappointed with the under utilization and poor writing of the other performers, especially Riz Ahmed and Michelle Williams. I've really enjoyed both of these actors, especially Ahmed recently, and this movie gave them really nothing to work with. Michelle Williams was the stereotypical love interest. I think we've gotten to the point where characters like that aren't automatically the damsels in distress which is good, but they haven't really mastered what to replace the damsel in distress tropes with yet so instead we get a really boring potential love interest. To be honest, her and Brock's chemistry isn't really there.

And Riz Ahmed is a stereotypical one dimensional villain. His plans are so muddled and confusing that he really lost me before the second half of the film. They state in the trailer but eventually he gets a symbiote and the two of them and Venom and Brock get into a fight near the end... and oh boy does it look like garbage.

Not only is the third act so rushed and incoherent that it's hard to really care, but for the most part its just a CGI fest where nothing seems real and it doesn't feel like real stakes.

With how much money this movie has made, I would be very surprised if it didn't get a sequel, but I'm worried that the conclusion is just going to be another CGI symbiote fight and the truth is, it was ridiculous in this movie, but only ridiculous enough for this individual movie. I can't imagine them doing it again and getting away with it. That is something I think they could have fixed in this movie and probably will need to fix in the sequel if it happens, the CGI.

To be fair to the movie, I can't imagine this is a very easy character to make look serious. Venom might be a cool character in the comic books, but that's because its a visual medium that lends itself to more wacky looking characters.

And while I think they probably did the best they can, I think I just have a hard time taking a character that looks like this seriously in general. The first time that Venom shows up in his entirety, I just had to laugh because it looked kind of silly. I think I described the CGI to a friend in this way. If at one end of the spectrum you have Thanos being an example of great CGI, and Steppenwolf from Justice League as the other end of the spectrum as an example of bad CGI, I think Venom is right in the middle for me.

I honestly don't think it's any better than the CGI used in Spider-man 3 when Venom last appeared on the big screen, and that was over 10 years ago. Again, I think it's a challenge, but it kind of brings me to the next point that I think this movie didn't succeed in and that's exactly what tone it was going for.

Honestly, I think while he wasn't written very well, Venom worked perfectly in the Sam Raimi Spider-man universe because that was just a campy movie and anything went in that series. But the trailers and I think at least certain shots of this movie wanted this movie to be a horror action movie. And I think I see those moments in the movie and there's probably an edit of this movie that was a lot darker (and probably rated R), and yet the movie feels like it got torn to pieces in the editing room.

The upside of that is that we get a ridiculous movie that I had far too much fun than I really should have because the edits make it this over the top ridiculous film. The downside is that the story is a mess, most characters don't have coherent arcs, and I just feel like the movie got really lucky that people didn't really adhere to any kind of critical response to this film. The movie has a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes and yet it's making a lot of money. There will be a sequel and I don't see them really learning any lessons and that movie being any good at all. Will I see it though? Well of course I am, this movie was a fun wild ride, and I think that's the bottom line throughout this all.

Venom is a flaming pile of garbage. It's not good. But its actually pretty funny how bad that it is in just the right ways that I will recommend it. If you're on the fence about it, I'd say wait till it's out of theaters and rent it because it might not be the film for you, but regardless, just make sure your expectations are low and get ready to see a weird film.

But those are my thoughts on Venom, I might do a spoiler review but more than likely not. Venom doesn't speak to me as much as other films and I don't know if I'm up for dedicating that time to a spoilers review. However, because this movie made a lot of money for Sony, I do potentially see a larger future for Venom and that does kind of excite me, so we'll see. Maybe. But what did you think? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

Thanks for reading.