Terato Requests

So first of all, as I mentioned before the tone is all over the place. It teases us with hints of the sci fi horror it was pitched as but won’t commit. It tries to be serious one moment, then slips into near-parody of superhero action, particularly around the villain. It makes vague motions at social commentary that it never follows through on (you can’t talk about the plight of the homeless and then also use the homeless for cheap scares and expect your earlier commentary to stand up) but most of the time it’s just generic superhero flavored action. The best moments are when it stops trying to be serious and indulges a little in the absurdity of the concept, but those moments are so tonally out of sync with everything else that they feel taken from a different movie and in the end I suspect even those couple of good moments came from a producer somewhere saying “make it like deadpool. people like deadpool. but not too much like deadpool, because this serious gritty action with Themes like dark knight, people like dark knight.” The movie can’t nail down what it’s trying to be and it feels like it’s fighting itself. It’s like half the people involved wanted to go campy and fun and the other half wanted to do something dark and scary and it cant commit to either. At best, its tonally jarring as it jumps between these two concepts. At worst, they just blend into something mediocre. I would have loved this as a good serious sci fi horror that spends the first acts building up Venom as something sinister, and then shifts in the second half to Venom and Eddie being victims thrown together by the real evil that threatens them both, where the goal is more survival than triumph and a heavy emphasis on suspense. I also would have loved an absurd, gorey buddy action comedy that leans into the Deadpool vibe and plays up Eddie and Venom bickering and bonding over dumb shit and ultimately taking down the bad guy more by dumb luck and teamwork than anything else. But what we get is a few scenes of the sci fi horror version cut with a bad rom com which, by the end of the first act, becomes a generic action movie with no substance, occasionally interrupted by single shots from the buddy comedy.

The pacing drags at the beginning and then rushes for the rest of the movie. It feels frantic, jumping from one action scene into another without ever stopping to breathe or process, which makes the action more forgettable and severely hampers their ability to develop the plot or the characters. The entire first act of the movie feels almost entirely unnecessary. We get multiple scenes of Riot changing hosts and traveling that aren’t needed (after he jumps into the EMT we really don’t need to see him again until the climax) and Eddie’s introduction is drawn out way more than it needs to be, delaying the action. The movie could have started after he’s already lost his job and girlfriend and given us everything that happened before that in like one or two lines of dialogue. Even after that, they pad with more scenes of Eddie pining over Anne that don’t tell us anything new or even really develop the characters. Once the action finally begins, it’s like they think they’ve filled their quota for establishing anything and now they can’t afford any more character interaction or set up. It’s all action beats from there till the ending. 

The screen time spent on that dragged out first act could have been much better spent establishing Venom’s motivations, which get glossed over in pretty egregious fashion considering it’s the title character. Venom goes from “gotta kill all humans” to “actually I like it here and im going to betray my whole race and probably die” in the space of a scene. All its development is flat out stated directly by Venom and never shown in any meaningful way. It just says that it’s changed its mind without anything to show the process of it changing. I also feel like this weakens Venom’s character overall. Its meant to be this amoral antihero, but switches to straight up self sacrificing heroics with no transition. A more believable transition motive might have been something like: “Actually, I like it here on earth because humans are super easy to hunt. If the rest of my species shows up I’ll have to deal with a lot of competition and since im bottom of the pecking order i’ll end up with scraps and honestly fuck that noise.” At least have it debate running away and hiding rather than risking its life and Eddies life in what it says it knows is a pretty doomed effort to stop Riot. Let him and Eddie bond over deciding together to try and protect something more important than themselves. As it is, Eddie doesn’t feel involved in the decision to stop Riot at all, and Venom appears to have been persuaded to martyr itself by nothing but a glimpse of the San Fran skyline.

The movie over all has some interesting issues with ‘show don’t tell’- it shows what would be better off told (ie a lot of the unnecessary early scenes- we don’t need to see Riot switching bodies in an extended action scene, we can just be told it headed to america, and everything else that scene establishes is covered later.) and tells what it should be showing (ie: Venom just declaring Eddie is the reason it wants to stay, when if they’d been given proper time to develop a relationship that should have been obvious).

Also, the movie seems to be of two minds about Eddie and Venom’s relationship. It gives occasional, half assed support to Eddie and Venom caring about each other (by Venom just saying it out loud again, and some of the final action sequence) but it also consistently undermines this by not giving them any scenes to really establish a relationship or any reason to care about each other (pmuch all their time together is a continuous action scene in which Eddie is either scared shitless, violently ill, or both) and also leaning weirdly hard into Eddie’s relationship with Anne, including making Venom ship that, which feels tonally weird and out of character. Again, they could have made it work if they’d spent some time developing it, establishing that Venom is invested in things that make Eddie happy and it thinks Anne will do that, or even that Venom is itself is into Anne. But literally the only time Eddie and Venom really stop and have a conversation is that first confrontation wherein Venom threatens Eddie and calls him a loser. All the rest of their interactions are quips on the go. They don’t have time to find common ground or bond. Ideally, they need at least one more scene later on where the action slows down long enough for them to talk and reach an understanding to even begin to make Venom’s flip and their bond make sense.

The actors seem kind of lost the majority of the time, like they aren’t sure what they’re supposed to be feeling in any given scene. The only one who seems to be confident in what they’re doing is Riz Ahmed, and that may just be because he’s playing a cartoon super villain whose only distinct character trait is a god complex which the script telegraphs in fucking neon. More than anyone he embraces that the only way to play a character like that is to go as campy as possible and he makes it work. I wish the script had let him run with it more honestly. He would have looked great really chewing the scenery. Hardy defaults to fear and confusion, which is appropriate, but makes his performance kind of one note and doesn’t really support him and Venom getting along. His panicked antics are entertaining enough to keep you watching, but don’t give him much personality. Michelle Williams’s Anne is a cypher whose personality is whatever it needs to be for the plot and so her acting feels a bit subdued. She can’t play up any particular quirk or personality trait because it’ll probably be contradicted in the next scene. The character is just a featureless icon of inoffensive femininity. The one place it feels like William’s makes a choice about the characterization is (and this is just how I’m reading her so ymmv) she seems to be interpreting Anne as being over Eddie. Unfortunately the script can’t seem to decide if she’s right or not. I can’t tell if the new boyfriend’s lack of defensive animosity to Ed is intentional in the script or just how the actor is playing it, because everything else seems to put her into a standard love interest box. “Gotta get my girl back” is probably the only personal motivation Eddie has, honestly? Everything else is just him getting dragged along by the plot. The plot setting him up with this goal and then making Anne unobtainable without adequately subverting or replacing that motive weakens Eddie’s only real characterization and ends up feeling like a loose plot thread, an uncompleted arc. The ending scene suggests he’s going to keep trying to get her back, but also feels like it’s doubling down on her lack of interest. Again, it may be me interpreting how William’s acted the scene, but the whole “the kiss was your friend’s idea” thing felt like a nail in the coffin for them getting back together. Particularly the fake out with “it felt good though” where she realizes how that sounded and kind of cringes before clarifying that she meant *being* Venom felt good. Which, like, relatable. I too would enjoy becoming a gorgeous and incredibly powerful seven foot tall monster woman. And I would definitely get distracted during conversations thinking about it. But both of those things- her being completely over him and him still pursuing her, feels wrong. 

Speaking of, and not to harp on her unnecessarily, but Anne feels super unnecessary all together. She has nothing to do- she’s just there to be the obligatory female love interest. This is made worse by the fact that, imo, she has no chemistry with Tom Hardy, though that could be a result of her character having no personality for either of them to work off of. While I liked the supportive boyfriend character, the movie might have been better served by combining his character with William’s, so that she was at least serving a purpose in the narrative. I don’t think she passes the Sexy Lamp test tbh. Her involvement in the plot boils down to- Eddie stealing the files from her, her introducing Eddie to a doctor, the scene where Venom possesses her to save Ed, and being the deus ex machina at the end by playing loud noise to freak out the symbiotes. I don’t think I need to go into detail on just how easily she could be removed entirely. But considering she’s basically Eddie’s only human connection I’d rather she was just beefed up a little, given more personality and more relevance to the plot. Williams is a good actress, I just feel like she has nothing to work with here. As a side note, the scene where the symbiote possesses Anne is super frustrating for me, because on the one hand *~Monster Lady Hot~* - and on the other it feels like a big “no homo” that they had to give Venom boobs in order to have it kiss Eddie. Doubly frustrating because there wasn’t even enough support for their relationship in the film for me to feel like the kiss was justified to begin with. Like they barely touch on the relationship at all, but still feel like they need to hide it under a hetero safety blanket just in case. Honestly, it was probably a condition of getting the rating down to PG13 now that I think about it. I get that they worried an R rating would prevent future Spiderman cross overs but, first of all, you don’t get a franchise if you shoot your first movie in the foot trying to make it open to sequels and I really wish film makers would figure that out. Making a good movie should always be the first priority. If your future franchise plans hurt the movie as a stand alone you’re doing it wrong. And second, honestly, why even do a Venom movie if you’re not going to commit to the two most basic elements of the character? Venom’s whole thing, even putting aside the relationship with Eddie, is edgy 90′s gore and being uncomfortably sexual.That’s the character. Also, Deadpool is going to want a Spiderman crossover eventually and I can bet you they’ll get it even with the R rating. The rating, like a lot of the problems in the movie, feels like pressure to play it safe interfering with everything that might have made the movie better.