Venom

A superhero/anti-hero origin story, Venom is Sony’s first foray to bring the Marvel universe into the big screen, and it is safe to say that it was quite a bumpy start to the ride. Venom is filled with so many little and big exasperating things; I say exasperating because you are genuinely affected by how poorly it was pieced together after having had huge expectations. I can honestly say that I got the feeling of watching ‘Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice’ again – a humongous mess.  That comparison itself is sufficient, but this movie maybe even a tad bit worse than the aforementioned one. ‘Venom’ fails to deliver what I wanted, although there are some redeeming qualities, most of the cinema was a dud, and it made me sad to watch it unravel like this.

‘Venom’, a character created by a bunch of tripped out marvel staff writers wanting to create a cooler facet to the endearing Spiderman, is an amorphous sentient sludge that requires a host to bond with to survive. Venom is one of many ‘symbiotes’ that were brought back here by a spacecraft after it had detected lifeforms on a comet. At least that’s how it is portrayed in, this version. But it is when the dices begin to roll and we get to the part where the story begins, that the innate flaws present begin to crack open the whole film.

Eddie Brock as a character is thinly designed, although I will say that he is the one with the most depth. He is a journalist who has his life turned upside after confronting Carlton Drake regarding his unethical business expansionism. Drake ruins his career, his relationship with his girlfriend, his equanimity is affected and he even loses his apartment. Everything is going downhill for him. He is down in the dumps. This is the character of Eddie Brock – a gutsy guy who becomes a loser and now trudges down the street, drunk and looking to find any measly job he could do. Eddie is played by Tom Hardy

Carlton Drake, the primary antagonist of the film owns the spacecraft that retrieves the alien and brings it back to earth to experiment with it. He wants the alien life-form to bond with living organisms from earth, and although he starts with animals, he decides to go for human trials. Drake is manipulative, and amoral visionary scientist and entrepreneur. He is possessed with a God complex and always talks about the inevitable end of society and how he is going to save us from extinction. He couldn’t be more clichéd than this even if they tried to make him. He is played by Riz Ahmed.

None of the supporting characters left a positive impression, they absolutely made a travesty of the female supporting characters. The timid, but do-good Dr Skirth was given such a poor treatment that you felt when she died, it was kind of merciful because she was pathetically formed. But even worse than her character was the one of Annie, the former girlfriend of Eddie Brock, played by the legendary Michelle Williams. Yes, she is a legend of our time, she has bountiful talent, and with a just a few minutes in ‘Manchester by the sea’, she delivered a performance that would have left any other actress in sheer awe. But here, OH MY GOD, this is her worst role yet. What was she thinking? This does absolutely nothing for her, in fact, it might have done the complete opposite.

The story is as formulaic as it can get. Once venom infects Eddie, he begins to have auditory hallucinations, which were, in fact, the symbiote who calls itself Venom talking to Eddie, and in these few moments, we see the prowess of Hardy to etch out whatever he could from this thinly designed character. These are the moments that we feel for Eddie, because he is genuinely in conflict and undergoing serious physical and psychologically trauma, and it’s a good dose of laugh - Schadenfreude, and also because he goes through all of this with a nonchalance that is hilarious in parts.

Similarly, the character of Venom who once infects Eddie is a whole different person from Eddie, the sort of bromance that develops between the two is charming but at the same time, it is a very jarring contrast to the actions that they take, such as decapitating people. Yes, they only decapitate the bad guys, but still, the lightness and the apathy that they take doesn’t come out as comical, at least in most instances, it’s just straight out disturbing. Others might feel different, and I understand that, but this is where I felt that the ‘Venom’ character lacked that someone like Deadpool so easily emanates. It felt heavily contrived and the most genuine moment of pathos, when Venom decides not to destroy the planet and remain here on Earth because he empathized with Eddie for being a loser, came out like a sad sob confessing after he had had too many drinks. But still, there is room for improvement.

However, the rest of the film will go down as a complete mess, and it will take a long time for a lot of us to get to the sober realisation, that this movie was like not really good as you thought it was. The pinnacle of how much of a turd that the movie became can be illustrated by looking at the climax of the film.

A symbiote that had escaped from the spacecraft, and then jumped from human to human until it reached just in time to infect Carlton Drake is revealed to be the leader of the planned invasion that ‘Venom’ was initially bent on doing. However, once he had changed his mind, he had become a reluctant ally to the human race. This new symbiote is even given a name, ‘Riot’. Now that Carlton Drake is infected, he accelerates his plan to send for the invasion force by hopping on Drake’s spacecraft and retrieve the rest of his companions. But here comes Venom to save the day!!??

Yeah, what ensures after is a terrible mess of climactic scene – where every single cliché of action movie denouements is applied to create a rise in tension, which never happens. Although we care about Venom, we do not care if he dies or even if Eddie does. There isn’t enough shit that we could give for Venom now, as he is a terrifying creature that is a genuine threat. Just because there is seemingly a bigger threat, we can’t suddenly shift our full sympathies towards him.

The action scenes unfold like a literal sludge fest. Symbiote fighting Symbiote, human fighting humans, just a wasted array of punches of kicks to rev the intensity that so does not happen. I was left in a state of disillusioned disgust as I watched the movie slowly descend into an utterly shitty end. The human race is saved, Venom’s apparent sacrifice is not a sacrifice?!, and Eddie getting his job back. Profoundly unfulfilling. Even though there was an attempt to revive the bromance of Eddie and Venom in the final few scenes, that sort of worked, the film had done enough damage to make that scene utterly worthless.

This movie is a commercial hit, because if u are not really concentrating on any of these glaring flaws that I found so obvious, then with a blissful kind of ignorance, you can call it a worthy escapist entertainment. Hey, who knows, it might even become a cult film. But jeez, this was quite a sludge and often times disgusting, both cinematically and literally, movie to watch. The most revolting scene of the movie was the monumentally unromantic and downright nauseating kiss between Williams and Hardy’s character, as Venom detaches from one host to another. Ugh!!