Written by 8:36 pm Arts, Reviews • One Comment

Venom: “Like a Turd in the Wind”

Ever since Marvel came to an agreement with Sony studios on sharing the license for Spider-Man and including it into its own cinematic universe, Sony has tried to feed off the success of this agreement even further. With various new ideas in the animations department and spin-off movies being considered, fans of Spider-Man and everything related to it have been cautiously optimistic. One of the first examples for this was Venom. With prestigious actor Tom Hardy manning the role of Eddie Brock, the character who possesses Venom, people started to get excited. This excitement reached peak level with the first couple of trailers where a darker tone was noticeable, the comic roots were explicit and present and it seemed as if Venom was doing well without its main anchor, Spider-Man.

However, when the first couple of reviews came out, it became more and more apparent that Venom, just like the character itself, had shape-shifted itself into something very different. Critics panned the movie, stating that its character dynamics were under-developed, the storyline was choppy and most importantly, it was not as dark as it was promoted to be. This seemed to be the consensus until the fans got to see the movie. They blamed the critics for being too harsh on the movie and stated that the movie itself was actually surprisingly good. This separation between audience and critic is clearly seen on Rotten Tomatoes, with each section having opposite percentages. The question then becomes: What is Venom?

Venom is a good time. However, it is not a good movie, especially when compared to the wide selection of superhero movies that are available to the masses. It is a good time as in it is funny, unique, surprising, and at times so bad that it makes you laugh even more. It is a movie that you watch if you would rather enjoy the content than think critically about it.

The story of Venom is simple. Eddie Brock is an investigative journalist who questions Carlton Drake, the founder of the LIFE Foundation, believing that he is utilizing homeless people in the Foundation’s experiments. After several interactions with the LIFE Foundation, Eddie meets Venom, a symbiote from another planet that imbues him with superhuman abilities. This starts a manhunt for Eddie as Carlton Drake tries to get his symbiote back and reshape the world based on his vision of combining human and symbiote.

Even though the story hits all the beats of a classic superhero movie, the way this story is executed with all of its plotlines is mind-bogglingly inconsistent and contradictory. The story is really choppy, as it jumps around all over the place. There is a noticeable time jump at the beginning of the film, which leads the viewer to question what developments took place that put Eddie in his current situation. The movie does not feel like one connected piece, but rather as if several scenes were lightly connected to each other. There is a whole other plotline that the film explores and that is completely unrelated to Eddie’s storyline. This plotline does not convey anything but the power a symbiote has, which is clearly highlighted by the prominent role of Venom.  Therefore, this alternative plotline useless.

The clashing tones in the film makes the story feel contradictory. The movie manages to replicate the atmosphere that marked the Venom comic series. However, the dialogue resembles that of a comedy. We see Eddie interacting with his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend, Venom scaring Eddie so much that he passes out, Eddie trying to meditate but failing due to his douchey neighbor. All of these scenes seem like cheap comedy thrills thrown into such a movie. This conflict between the setpieces and the content of the dialogue hurt the image of Venom as an intimidating anti-hero and reduce it to a parody of the character itself. This conflict also reduces the stakes that the movie is trying to portray, as the audience feels as if the stakes don’t matter since the movie is trying to be comedic.

The visual effects for Venom are decent, as they look realistic enough to exist in our world. However, there are some action scenes where special effects are really noticeable and make the audience care even less about the scene’s significance to the story. There are some really noticeable uses of green screen during the manhunt for Eddie and these shots are not even completely necessary.

One thing that this movie does do well is capture the relationship between Venom and Eddie. They are first introduced as a duo that is unable to cooperate, with Eddie trying to understand what happened to him and Venom trying to introduce himself and his purpose. As the movie progresses, they come to understand each other and come to an agreement on how they are going to act towards specific groups of people, which provides a nice exposition for the anti-hero characteristic.

Even with this character dynamic, however, the movie rushes certain aspects of the relationship to suit the arc of the movie. At one point, Venom makes a really important choice that is going to kickstart the climax to the movie. But the storyline provides no well-put explanation for this choice in the first place. Such actions, both by Venom and other characters such as Eddie’s ex-girlfriend Anne, do nothing but confuse the audience.

Many people had hoped that Venom was going to be the superhero movie that would prove to Marvel that people are indeed interested in gory, dark movies that break the classic hero movie mold. However, unlike what the marketing said, Venom never wanted to break that mold. In fact, some could say it embraced it even further by resembling the superhero movies of the early 2000s, such as Ben Affleck’s Daredevil and Halle Berry’s Catwoman. Once again, Venom is not a terrible movie. There are certain scenes which I enjoyed, and I did have a good time overall, but I remain shocked by the choices made in this movie. Venom is the type of movie one would watch when he or she wants to watch something intriguing, but not think too much about it, because, in the end, a turd in the wind is almost always going to be something interesting to look at.

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