Venom (2019) and Another Reboot: Rise Zombie Blog RISE!!!!

Wow I've not touched this blog in months. It was 2019 last time I posted and then I went silent with no explanation so um... surprise? Got better from my possession by the way it just seemed to vanish? it was weird I just woke up November 1st and it was gone... I'm sure it wont be back. Anyway, The silence had a lot to do with the fact that I started to write a novel... yeah like a real big boy novel. I got a draft done mid-December (at 58,000 words no less just wow). Anyway keeping quite about it for now but its a LONG way off so none of you all need to worry about it just yet. Rather, I'm gonna try and do this blog thing again. So this is kinda another reboot of the blog I'm gonna mix more contemporary works in with the older stuff cause watching just older films was starting to annoy me and I'm going to upload less to accomodate the work on my novel. Gonna try for weekly uploads but no promises I can't keep. enough rambling: Venom was a thing I just watched, and I wanna talk about so here we go.

Man it's weird how similar Venom was to Upgrade which came out that same year. Its kinda like Upgrade is the dark gritty reboot of Venom which is in and of itself kinda weird since Venom is supposed to the dark and gritty foil to Spider-Man. Venom felt more like a dark comedy than a comic book action film. the core of the film is not the action, or the plot, or really anything people expect to get from a comic book action film. The core is Venom and Eddie's relationship. It was the talk surrounding the depiction of Venom and Eddie that initially piqued my curiosity.

Of course I was exposed to the "tumblrized" version that depicted Venom and Eddie being cute and almost romantic and I fully expected that to be tumblr being tumblr, and for the most part that's the case. Venom and Brock are anything but cutesy and romantic, but there is this odd sense of perverse affection between the two. They exist in this stable state of mutually assured destruction that they both benefit from. Brock can easily kill Venom with loud noises or fire, and Venom can easily kill Brock by consuming his organs, but Venom can't live without a host, and for whatever reason Brock is the most compatable host. 

The relationship isn't exclusively based in negativity. Venom seems to have some affection for Brock. First off, amongst humans, Venom can wield a power that he doesn't have with his own kind. In his own words Venom is a loser amongst symbiots. That alone is reason enough for him to help Brock and fight off the other symbiotes but also Venom takes some pleasure in playing match maker between Brock and his ex Anne (more on that later actually). Venom even goes so far as to save Brock's life putting his own in direct danger which gestures at a more "friendly" relationship.

The problem is that it really is only a gesture at their relationship. There was so much more that could have been done between them, and Venom's affection for Brock comes out of nowhere one third of the way from the end in a super clunky expositional way. Venom just saves Brock's life and says he wants to stay on Earth and stop the other symbiots because he's a loser, and because he likes Brock. No further explanation he just wants to stay because he likes Brock. the movie needed to build this up for like five more minutes of runtime. I needed to see Venom and Brock bonding over somthing that wasn't life or death. Maybe highlight that Venom likes Tater Tots and Chocolate BEFORE the last scene of the movie. Or have them watch a movie or play videogames together... Is that too weird? Well so is having Venom just declare that he likes Brock... out of nowhere 2/3rds from the end of the film. The movie was clearly cut down for a PG-13 rating, but what feels missing is not the gore so much as the emotional core of the friendship between a parasitic alien and his human.

Oh and I totally forgot Brock and Anne's relationship... Eww. It started out great: they were engaged but they broke up for legitimate reasons and that helped percipitate Brock's descent into self pity and failure. Anne showed up again with a new boyfriend who, in spite of the trope, was not a jerk and was actually an unambiguously good guy. I really believed Anne is better off staying with this new guy, and both characters were learning to move on. Then Venom starts trying to get Brock back together with Anne and the movie frames this as a positive move and one of the ways Venom is helping Brock. I was almost able to dismiss this as Venom having a crush on Anne (He does say he likes her at one point) and is using Brock to be with her, but then they have Stan Lee himself encourage Eddie to get back together with Anne, and, for the audience, thats like having God himself enter the movie and telling Eddie to go for it. I would be more okay with this if Brock had overcome the problems that led to the break up but he hasn't if anything he's gotten worse in that particular area.

Anyway, it was overall a fun time and a solid movie. Tom Hardy's performance was impaccably executed, and almost overacted, but given the almost absurd comedic tone of the movie it gelled really well. There is a bold fantastic movie buried in here, but the functional, and fun movie we got is pretty well worth seeing.