So the Venom movie is out and, as you would expect, it is dominating at the box office. It’s been a rollercoaster of expectations leading up to now, probably more so than for most recent superhero movies. From the confusing first announcement that Sony would be producing a standalone Venom movie to the surprisingly impressive first trailers up to now, the movie could have been garbage, but there was a sliver of hope that it could be something unique and great.
It’s garbage. Well, not entirely.
The first part of the film, before Eddie Brock and Venom meet, is almost unwatchable. The characters’ actions don’t make sense, it has some incredibly mechanical dialogue, and it feels like the movie is creating a vacuum for itself in the shape of one NYC-based web slinger that Sony no longer has the rights to. Placing Eddie Brock’s solo story in San Francisco was a good move to distance this new story from the old one. Scripting a conversation in which it is explained that Brock was originally based out of New York, but his edgy, hard-hitting journalism made him too many enemies (ugh) and he was run out of town just brings us right back to Spiderman 3. If this story is entirely separate from Spiderman, it doesn’t have to explain every difference from this Eddie Brock and Eddie Brock from the comic book series/Sam Raimi’s Spiderman franchise. In certain moments, Venom does feel like its own thing entirely, but there are plenty of instances like that conversation where the script tries to push itself away from a universe that it shouldn’t even be acknowledging.
The antagonist of Venom is also introduced in this initial portion: Dr. Carlton Drake. Played by Riz Ahmed, Drake is an Elon Musk/Martin Shkreli type who is using his private space exploration company to investigate a race of aliens called symbiotes. Symbiotes need to have an earthling host in order to survive on the planet, but the merging of human and symbiote creates something much greater than the sum of its parts. In the cooperative existence between the two, the human-symbiote combination can heal itself, has super strength, can assume a monstrous shape, and do all sorts of other things that are never really sufficiently defined. Venom is one of these symbiotes, and after Eddie Brock becomes its host they team up to stop Drake from using the symbiotes to slaughter Earth’s population as part of a grand scheme that’s about as well-explained as Venom’s abilities. But whatever. We’re just going to the movies to see Venom rip people apart.
After a long, arduous 20 or 30 minutes of run time including ample proof of just how evil Carlton Drake is (the gravest of his crimes being the nonsensical “Isaac” monologue he forces the theater audience to listen to him deliver), Brock finally meets Venom. At this point, Venom gets a lot better. The focus of the film shifts to explore the relationship between Brock and Venom, leading to a lot of humor as Tom Hardy converses with Tom Hardy Using a Deep Voice. It takes a while after the two merge for them to actually develop this spoken relationship, but it gives the film a whole lot of charm that was completely absent before. You may have heard Venom described as “a rom-com masquerading as a superhero movie.” That description is absolutely correct. Another thing that we get once Eddie and Venom come together is a series of truly great fight sequences between Venom and various faceless hordes of Drake’s goons, police officers, etc. These sequences make satisfying use of CGI to bring Venom to life and manage to mix in humor amongst the carnage. The fight scenes alone (especially the last one) partially make up for the deficiencies of the writing, and Eddie and Venom’s relationship helps to keep the movie entertaining even when Venom’s not tearing up San Francisco.
If you don’t have anything better to do, go see Venom. It’s dumb and at times difficult to sit through, but it’s a genuinely fun movie and I’m looking forward to the development of Sony’s Universe of Misplaced Marvel Characters after having watched it. There are much, much worse bad movies that you could see.
Rating: 5/10
Noah Harouche is a sophomore in Columbia College.