Venom is the story of how Elon Musk’s Space X company is actually part of a secret program to create a super race of human-symbiote hybrids in order to avoid environmental disaster on earth, because doing that is easier than passing a carbon tax and trade plan. It was better than I was expecting it to be based on the reviews I read, which is to say it was fine. I thought it was closer to what I was hoping Suicide Squad would be except that neither of those movies was able to seduce the audience into just buying into the idea of wanting and enjoying a character who’s bad. Instead we’re left with these flimsy explanations of why it is that this evil demon tentacle monster grasps moral philosophy (and motorcycle handling?) as explained by the baby-voiced Eddie without really questioning or pushing back with its own set of beliefs or desires. For something that bites off heads and murders people with housing insecurity without too many qualms, Venom seems pretty onboard to refrain from misbehaving when given a stern talking to by his host.
Probably the most entertaining humor was exactly what Tom Hardy said it would be, the flesh puppet fight scenes where it’s not entirely clear that Eddie knows what’s coming next. I’m not sure if Upgrade had anything to do with it, or if there’s an entire genre of unwilling flesh puppet action movies I’m not aware of, but they did a great job perfecting something that was shittily implemented in the aforementioned film. That being said, a lot of the other staple action sequences were pretty meh. The car chase scene made me seriously question why we have car chase scenes in movies that aren’t primarily about cars and car-related activities (Fast and Furious, Baby Driver, you’re all right, but spy movies why you always making us watch you crash into stuff?).
One of the most unnecessarily distracting problems of this film is Michelle Williams’s character’s last name, Weiying. Is she adopted? Formerly married? Did they originally want to cast a Chinese actress but then got bored of trying and then didn’t bother to change the name? Is she supposed to be yellow-facing like Emma Stone in Aloha? Like, what’s going on there?
Jenny Slate did a meh job in her second sci-fi flick of the year (Hotel Artemis was a lot more entertaining of a performance, but it’s not her fault, someone forgot to give her lines).
I think there’s an unaccounted symbiote, the yellow one in the formerly stable black guy. Four to begin with. Blue one kills the doctor before dying. Riot gets Elon. The black one is Venom. Do we actually see the yellow one die? Elon does tell us that because the blue one is dead we can’t afford to lose Eddie’s. So, maybe that’s true? Can someone confirm?
So overall, not quite the dark, flipped-script that I was hoping for. Venom for all his sharp teeth is mostly a moral being who only kills for self-preservation and even grasps the finer points of good and evil, which is a little bit disappointing, but not so much that you shouldn’t see this instead of Little Foot.
