Despite strong acting, Sony’s Venom doesn’t represent the character for who he truly is. The film, released on Oct. 5, is directed by Ruben Fleischer and stars Tom Hardy as the title character. The film also stars Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed.
Venom is an alien symbiote that requires a human host in order to survive. Two of those hosts are Spider-Man, also known as Peter Parker, and Eddie Brock. Sony’s newest adaptation focuses more on Eddie Brock (Hardy), a journalist who learns of confidential research on the alien symbiotes by Carlton Drake (Ahmed), CEO of Life Foundation. Eddie breaks into Life Foundation to get pictures of what Drake is doing to human test subjects with the symbiotes. During the break in, Eddie is exposed to the symbiotes and becomes Venom. He discovers why the symbiote species is there and tries to put a stop to it.
The movie showed Venom’s good and bad side. At first Venom is behind the idea of taking over the world, an evil act, but Eddies brings out his good side. By Eddie being his host and Eddie not agreeing to be his host if he is going to destroy the world, Venom sees that what his kind is doing is a bad thing.
Tom Hardy’s interpretation of Venom was excellent and he did a great job of being Eddie Brock and Venom. He showed how terrifying it would be to have a “parasite” inside of you. They grew together as characters.
While the acting was good, major problems with the movie were the bad dialogue, bad editing, slow first act, and a terrible wig on one of the characters. The fact that they decided to make the movie PG-13 was the real problem. It took away who Venom really is: wisecracking and violent. If they had only went with Rated R, it would’ve made the movie slightly better.
The only thing that truly captured the audience at the end were the two post credit scenes: Cletus Kasady talks to Eddie about what’s to come (“Carnage”) and we catch a glimpse of what’s to come in the new Spider-Man, which will be released Dec. 14.
