{"id":316,"date":"2021-01-12T03:00:36","date_gmt":"2021-01-12T03:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/?p=316"},"modified":"2021-01-12T03:00:36","modified_gmt":"2021-01-12T03:00:36","slug":"venom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/?p=316","title":{"rendered":"Venom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

               As the old saying goes, you can\u2019t be everything to everyone. Venom <\/em>was seemingly made to prove this point. This movie is a goddamn mess that tries to throw in something for every conceivable audience and, as a result, it won\u2019t satisfy anybody. Comic fans will be annoyed by the butchering of the source material and non-comic fans are left with a generic, disjointed clusterfuck. Honestly, though, this movie is also a letdown for anyone that has read the reviews and is expecting a historically bad movie. I\u2019ve seen other reviewers refer to this as a future camp classis or midnight movie. One person even said that this could be the modern Rocky Horror Picture Show<\/em>. Bullshit. In order to achieve that kind of status, a movie must have heart. Be it good (Rocky Horror<\/em>) or bad (Troll 2<\/em>), movies like that have sincerity to them. Venom<\/em> doesn\u2019t have that. Venom<\/em> is a product of studio market research. Watching this movie is like reading a long studio note from an executive that has never read a comic, doesn\u2019t give a shit about the material and is just trying to make the movie match the results of a market survey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

               To get this out of the way, this movie has nothing to do with Spiderman. Considering that Spidey is vital part of Venom\u2019s origin, that\u2019s pretty amazing. It would be like making a movie about the origin of Frankenstein\u2019s Monster without acknowledging the existence of Dr. Frankenstein. That isn\u2019t a creative choice, either, but instead the consequence of complicated legal deals between Sony\/Columbia and Marvel\/Disney over the rights to Spiderman. Anyway, this takes place in San Francisco (not New York, presumably to explain why Spiderman takes no interest in any of this) where an evil company has acquired alien parasites (called symbiotes) in an effort to merge them with humans to save mankind. Or destroy it. I don\u2019t fucking know. The villain is the CEO and he\u2019s an almost humorously cliched \u201cevil businessman\u201d type. I don\u2019t even remember his name, so I\u2019m calling him Evil Elon Musk. One of the symbiotes (called Venom) escapes Evil Elon\u2019s lab and bonds with Eddie Brock, a local reporter. Together, Eddie and Venom must stop the incredibly generic evil plot while trying to have enough witty banter to distract you from how boring this is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

               My best comparison for this is the Spawn<\/em> movie from 1997, minus the bitchin\u2019 soundtrack that made that movie worth it. Both films have a gross misunderstanding of their source material, material that should have produced dark, violent, character-driven films. Instead, both films crush their characters with an avalanche of juvenile, misplaced humor and godawful computer effects. The tagline for this movie is \u201cThe World has Enough Superheroes,\u201d which is fucking baffling considering this is just a paint-by-numbers superhero movie. That would be bad enough if Venom was actually a superhero, but he isn\u2019t. Venom is a fucking villain. There is no reason to turn him into a hero other than eliminating the need to write an interesting script. Not every goddamn comic book movie has to follow the same formula. This should have been about Eddie struggling to contain an evil within himself. That would have been interesting. I didn\u2019t need all of this bullshit with Evil Elon and his army of drones trying to rule the world. Not only is that a misunderstanding of the material, it\u2019s just fucking lazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

               But what if you don\u2019t know anything about the comics and don\u2019t watch this with any pre-conceived notions about the characters? Well you\u2019re shit out of luck too. The tone of this movie is absolutely schizophrenic. It tries to be a comedy, a character study, an action film, a horror film and a superhero movie and, as a result, it is none of those things. It\u2019s like watching a producer go down a demographic checklist. There are decent moments, sure, but they are always quickly washed away by nonsense. The basic plot and villain are so laughably generic that you could only be engrossed of this is the first comic book movie that you\u2019ve ever seen. The fact that this was cut from an R-rating to a PG-13 is well documented and also obvious when you\u2019re watching the film; anytime Venom kills someone, the camera pulls away so fast that you would think its condom broke. Consequently, there is no punch to any of the violence in the film, but it\u2019s safe enough for the kiddies. Rumor has it that up to 45 minutes were cut from the film, both to tone down the violence and eliminate that character development stuff that gets in the way of the shitty superhero plot. Thanks, Sony. Fucking appreciate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

              The last act (in which Evil Elon is combined with another symbiote called Riot) is a fucking trainwreck of bad computer effects. Ever watch two black blogs of goo fight each other for 20 minutes? I have and I had no idea what the fuck was happening. Also, can we please get away from the trope of the villain simply being the evil version of the hero? I mean, really, other than Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Thor, Ant Man, Dr. Strange and Black Panther, this is the first fucking time that I\u2019ve seen that in a comic movie. For fuck\u2019s sake, make more interesting villains. Before this movie, I got the trailers for Aquaman<\/em> and Captain Marvel.<\/em> The Aquaman<\/em> villain is, you guessed it, basically just an evil version of Aquaman. I don\u2019t know who the villain is in Captain Marvel<\/em>, but I wouldn\u2019t be shocked if it\u2019s just a brunette in a darker Captain Marvel suit with the same powers as her. I\u2019ve fucking had it with this shit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

              I will say one nice thing about this movie: Tom Hardy and Michelle Williams are great in it. They are both really trying and have some legitimately nice dramatic moments between them. Too bad those moments are always broken up by some computer-generated explosion, but they aren\u2019t phoning it in. They should join Amy Adams in a support group for great actors slumming it in shitty comic book movies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

              I love comic books. I\u2019ve read comic books my entire life. But I just can\u2019t take this anymore. I feel like I see a dozen of these movies a year now and I can barely tell the difference at this point. I\u2019m fine with ones that do something different. I had Logan<\/em> as the best movie of 2017, after all. But for every great one (Logan<\/em>) or good one (Wonder Woman<\/em>), I get six shitty ones that are just repeating the same fucking crap on auto-pilot to have a big opening weekend at the box office and then get played on repeat on TNT in two years. This isn\u2019t for comic book fans, it isn\u2019t for non-comic fans, it isn\u2019t even for fans of bad movies. This is for fucking nobody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image By: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Venom_(2018_film)#\/media\/File:Venom_(2018_film_poster).png<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

               As the old saying goes, you can\u2019t be everything to everyone. Venom was seemingly made to prove this point. This movie is a goddamn mess that tries to throw in something for every conceivable audience and, as a result, it won\u2019t satisfy anybody. Comic fans will be annoyed by the butchering of the source […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13,3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-13","category-action","category-superhero"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thefilmdoctor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/image-1.png?fit=266%2C378&ssl=1","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":807,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions\/807"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}