Venom Review

I was worried about this movie, because I first heard about a standalone Venom movie back in 2014 shortly after the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But due to that movie’s rather negative reception, Venom and the Sinister Six spin-off were shelved, at least as far as I know. Then ealrier this year, I heard that Venom would be releasing and Tom Hardy would be playing Eddie Brock, and Venom. I was excited, because Venom is one of if not my favorite Marvel character, and I was really hoping that this adaptation would do the character justice. But, I was still hesitant, because of how late the movie was since I first heard that it was in development. So, did it live up to my expectations, or did it fail like I was worried it was going to?

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Venom is interesting, because it’s a combination of the origin story for the symbiote, and the Venom: Lethal Protector comic mini-series. Venom, and the other symbiotes, all come from space, but they’re brought on a rocket ship instead of Venom crashing alone on a meteorite. This slight discrepancy is fine, because without making a few modifications, it’s impossible to make a Venom origin story without Spider-Man.

The movie follows Eddie Brock as he investigates Carlton Drake, a wealthy man who owns the Life Corporation and does rather sinister things under the guise of progress. After an interview goes poorly, Eddie loses his job, and his fiancée Anne loses hers, because Eddie looked at classified documents that Anne had because she was working on a legal case involving the Life Corporation. Shortly after that, Dora Skirth, one of Drake’s scientists, approaches Brock and tells him about the stuff that Drake is doing. This prompts Brock to break into the Life Corporation in order to gather evidence against Drake, and he comes face to face with Drake’s human test subjects. After recognizing one of them, Eddie tries to break her out and she attacks him, transferring the Venom symbiote in the process.

Now that Venom is living inside of Eddie, his health begins to deteriorate and he works with Anne and her new boyfriend Dan, a doctor, to try to figure out what’s wrong. Meanwhile, Drake finds out about what happened, and he sends his men after Eddie. The men attack Eddie and Venom in Eddie’s apartment, but the symbiote is able to easily fend them off, and this leads to a car chase all around San Francisco.

After the car chase, Eddie heads back to the offices where he used to work so he can drop off his phone with the pictures of Drake’s labs on it so he can expose Drake for the crooked things that he’s been doing, but he is attacked by a SWAT team. Venom easily dispatches the team, right as Anne shows up in search of Eddie. Reunited, Eddie and Anne head back to the hospital, because Eddie’s test results have come back and it looks like “the parasite” (Venom) inside of Eddie is slowly killing him. Alarmed, Anne forces Eddie and Venom to separate, and Eddie leaves, now free of the symbiote. However, as he is leaving, Drake’s men arrive and capture Brock.

Drake is fascinated with Brock, because he wants to know how and why he achieved symbiosis with the Venom symbiote so perfectly. Drake has also achieved symbiosis, this time with the symbiote Riot, who traveled all the way from the crashed rocket in Malaysia back to San Fransisco (I’ll get to why this bugs me in a minute). But now that Eddie is no longer bonded with Venom, Drake doesn’t need him, and leaves him for his henchman to finish off. But of course, Venom shows up, this time bonded with Anne, and saves Eddie. Now that Eddie and Venom are together again, they work to fight, and eventually kill, Drake and Riot, because Drake and Riot’s goal is to go back into space and bring back millions of symbiotes that will consume the earth. Everything ends well and Eddie gets his journalism career back and Anne continues to work as a defense attorney.

Of course this wouldn’t be a Marvel movie without a post-credit scene and boy does this one deliver. In short, Carnage is FINALLY going to appear on the big screen and I am excited, since Carnage is easily my favorite villian in the Marvel universe.

Now, my biggest gripe with the movie is how the source material was handled. Don’t get me wrong, the movie does an absolutely fantastic job of staying faithful, for the most part, to the source material, such as the movie being set in San Fransisco or Carlton Drake being the antagonist. However, when there are discrepancies, I questions why that specific decision was made. For example, Riot was an offspring of the Venom symbiote in the Lethal Protector comic. I don’t know why the Venom symbiote didn’t show up, get tortured, then give birth to the other five symbiotes. Heck, make it six and the issue of Carnage is solved since I doubt Eddie Brock will be serving time in prison with Cletus Kassady, unless of course this happens when Brock interviews Kassady, but that’s speculation for another day. In short, I understand why things were changed, but I feel like they could have been changed to be a little more comic accurate. Granted that statement may be wrong, because I do know that the movie was also based off of the Planet of the Symbiotes arc and I am NOT familiar with that one. It also bugs me a little how Riot kind of comes out of nowhere at the end and is suddenly an antagonist. Frankly, I wish that they would have taken a little bit more time with Riot, but I feel like they did a great job with Drake.

My other complaint is this: at the beginning of the movie, Riot escapes the crash site and begins jumping from host to host as he makes his way to San Fransisco before ultimately bonding with Carlton Drake. I don’t understand this, because Riot was going to end up there anyway if he stayed put at the crash site. It seems incredibly strange (and impractical) that Riot would go on such a long journey that ended in the same place, just much, much later.

SPOILERS END

Now that my summary and nitpicks are out of the way, I can move on to what I like, and boy did I like a lot.

Now that I’m taking a film study in school, I’m starting to pay a bit more attention to the cinematography and techniques used in a movie. And even though the cinematography is nothing groundbreaking in Venom, there are a few key scenes that come to mind in which I can say that the lighting was absolutely phenomenal. The effects, for the most part, were also great throughout the movie.

I thought that the actions and fight sequences were very interesting, well choreographed, and overall brutal. This is something that I was a little worried about, because I was always under the impression that this movie would be rated R. Since it was rated PG-13, I was worried that some of the brutality that was a part of Venom’s character would have to be toned down. I can safely say that I was worried for nothing. The action was brutal, but it wasn’t graphic. There are a few scenes of faces getting bitten off, but the gory bits all occur off camera. Frankly, I feel like even if we saw the gory bits in a more R rated way, not much would really be added to the movie. I suppose that some of the other fights could be a bit more brutal, but they’re fine in all honesty.

Overall, I found the story of Venom to be enjoyable, and I loved all of the action and everything else that the movie had to offer, other than my few minor nitpicks. If you enjoy comic book movies, then go check out Venom; it’s a lot of fun and I for one loved it, giving it a solid 8.3/10.