I Finally Watched Venom
Rondo of Blog - Published: October 18, 2023
Like a lot of people, I was alive when a surprising number of people actually ended up enjoying Venom (2018 film) - a film I’d technically followed for years, as one of my earliest memories of looking up the latest in comic book movie news was reading about Sony stringing along poor old Topher Grace with the promise of a big movie all for him.
I was surprised to see people reading it as a gay rom-com, I read their reasoning and found it sound enough, and even reblogged many such interpretations of the film! But I never actually got around to watching it until a couple weeks ago.
Sorry to report, I thought it was terrible! (Spoilers onward from this point.)
Before I dig into it, I should stress that I did go in looking for what the gay rom-com enjoyers saw in the film, and I did ultimately see some of what they were seeing.
It’s just, again, all around a movie I found to be terrible and only momentarily-enjoyable to watch! Even the laughs it gave me in the moment left an aftertaste that only got worse with time. It’s especially weird for me, since I really like campy shit! It is campy, it’s just… it’s just terrible!
I’ll start with maybe the film’s biggest problem - Eddie Brock. In particular, where is Eddie Brock? Was he in an earlier draft of the film and got written out in favor of a character of the same name but with hardly any of the DNA of the character left? I wasn’t there, I can’t say for sure.
What we’re left with is an Eddie who, at least, is still a bad journalist! But unlike the brash Brock of the iconic 1990’s Spider-Man cartoon who’s an unabashed piece of shit and perfect candidate for the symbiote after Peter Parker’s dumped it, this Eddie is just a lil guy.
This Eddie Brock may be a godawful journalist, but he’s got a good heart! And he’s only going after the bad guys! When he blows up his girlfriend’s career for maybe the most ineffectual ‘gotcha’ in hard-hitting interview history, he’s sooo sad about it! Don’t you just feel sad for him???
Yes, in what I can only assume was meant to be a scene that had any bite to it, Eddie uses confidential information provided to his girlfriend by her employer to briefly surprise and annoy some CEO dickbag. It doesn’t get the CEO dickbag in trouble, it costs his girlfriend her job, and all Eddie has to show for himself by the end is his weak “the dead foundation” quip against the unethical ‘Life’ Foundation - which he repeats, seemingly after no one laughs the first time.
No one laughed the first time because it wasn’t funny, Eddie. It just sounds pathetic the second time.
One of the few characters I was able to even sort of identify with over the course of the film’s runtime, when she wasn’t being written as a fire-breathing she-devil unleashing her rage on poor Eddie, was Anne. Anne is the poor, unlucky girl who ended up with the sad sack this film calls Eddie. I sympathize with her, because I too hate Eddie and am sorry for any energy I wasted on believing in him.
Eventually Eddie bonds with the symbiote we call Venom, at which point the film probably has its longest string of good-ish moments - Venom arguing that Eddie is making them ‘look bad,’ and the very brief window of time in which the ensuing chase sequence feels cool.
All of these moments are hampered by the fact that we’re depicting an utterly edgeless Eddie Brock. He doesn’t really get an arc so much as he gets his life turned around while being the same weird and pathetic guy he started the film as.
What would’ve helped is if the film had the courage to actually see Eddie Brock as the massive piece of shit he is in the text, but I guess that might’ve alienated the audience if they didn’t do it well. What never left my mind as I watched the film was how this was a Sony Spider-Man Universe film, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Morbius, and the most important thing it can accomplish is help Sony make money off of Spider-Man characters in perpetuity.
The rest of the plot isn’t even worth going over, I don’t think. The Life Foundation’s CEO gets a Venom, they have a big Venom fight where they Venom all over each other, and it just doesn’t ever solidify into anything meaningful.
At the risk of sounding cheesy (though that never stopped this film, why should it stop me?) this movie just doesn’t have any bite to it. An ironic problem for a Venom movie to have, for sure. The risks it takes make it feel weird, not endearing. The risks it doesn’t take make it feel cowardly.
Its own protagonist embodies its shortcomings best - Eddie is just too wishy-washy and unrelatable for me to connect with. He doesn’t take enough chances, at least not any that jeopardize him so much as it jeopardizes everyone around him, and I just don’t think he’s the perfect match for Venom that this film weirdly insists he is.
I also saw the sequel a week after I saw the first. I had thoughts about it after I watched it, but honestly none of them feel like they’d be worth the energy it’d take to write them out, so that should give you a pretty good idea of how worth it I’d say watching it was. I wish I liked it, I wish I could join all the people who celebrated it as a gay rom-com, but there’s really just nothing here for me.
No rating at the end. If that leaves you feeling disappointed and lacking in closure, congratulations! You’ve basically just enjoyed the Venom experience. There’s plenty of better superhero movies to watch (The Flash, Wonder Woman 1984, just to name a couple I’ve watched for the first time this year) so please don’t waste your time with this one.