Venom

Does anyone remember Spider-Man 3? You know, “emo” Peter Parker? I was a nine-year-old boy who hadn’t been more excited for anything ever. Three villains? Venom?! My mind was blown! I walked out of the movie theater wide-eyed and thinking that no other movies needed to be made ever since cinema had reached its peak. This is how I imagine nine-year-olds feel about Venom (2018). It’s action packed, unnecessarily fast-paced, and full of cheesy dialogue. My opinions on Spider-Man 3 have since changed, but my love for Spider-Man and all related characters has not. When I heard that Venom was getting its own movie, I felt like I was nine-years-old again, much like I’m sure many other people felt. I did not, however, come out of the theater feeling the same way I did back in 2007.

From the very beginning of the film, audiences are shown the bleak and downtrodden world in which the film is about to take place. Eddie Brock (played by Tom Hardy) is a successful investigative reporter who plays by his own rules (except when he gets fired). Anne Weying (played by Michelle Williams) is barely present in the movie other than being taken over by Venom for a brief moment in the film. Almost every character seems all too familiar, playing into their stereotypes with predictable dialogue to go along with it. The villain is your good, old-fashioned owner of a shady science company that wants to take over the world.

One interesting aspect of this film is the collection of symbiotes and how they interact with the world around them. The film opens with a space shuttle returning to Earth that contains a total of four symbiotes, which eventually cause the space shuttle to crash. All but one of the symbiotes fall into the possession of the aforementioned stereotypical villain, Carlton Drake (played by Riz Ahmed). The lone symbiote is not Venom, but Riot, a symbiote who eventually finds his way to Carlton Drake and wants to take his rocket to space in order to bring back millions of symbiotes to take over the world. One of the symbiotes in Carlton Drake’s lab is, of course, Venom, who finds Eddie Brock, and the titular character’s journey begins. Venom acts as both an alter ego to Eddie Brock as well as its own independent character with its own motives. Venom is actually the funniest character in the film with the wittiest humor and the most entertaining lines of dialogue, unlike Riot.

Despite the entertainment the character of Venom provides, this still clashes with the tone of the rest of the film. The movie seems unsure what it wants to be: Clever? Serious? Humorous? Violent? Epic? It’s unbalanced. Evidenced by (most of) their other dozens of films, Marvel has this tonal formula figured out, but Venom proves that Marvel doesn’t always get it right.