Venom

Venom (2018; dir. Reuben Fleischer) embraces the spirit of comics.  It doesn’t try to raise the level of its story above the level of its source.  It’s energetic, fast, full of wit and irony, and basic.  It works.  The film has an unusually long exposition during which it introduces characters, follows the crash landing of a private research vessel on earth, which results in the release of alien beings, and introduces a ruthless, brilliant ,and wealthy mad scientist, Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed).  Our main character is Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), a famous investigative reporter who is loud and brash and not entirely scrupulous.  He’s in a relationship with a lawyer, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), which comes to an end early in the film after Eddie makes a mistake that costs him and Anne their jobs.  One intuits that the relationship is not necessarily at an end, a point of doubt that will indubitably continue into the sequel.

The aliens cannot survive on earth, so they occupy the bodies of human hosts.  Eddie (through a circuitous series of misevents) is taken as the host by one of the aliens.  We learn that the aliens have come to the earth intending to feed on the inhabitants.  Eddie’s alien periodically breaks out, and he often tells his host what to do.  What begins as a terrible calamity for Eddie gradually becomes something else.  His alien grows to like Eddie and the earth, and they reach an agreement about how to work together.  (Eddie’s alien is Venom, but I really can’t recall how this information came out). There’s a campy, humorous feel to the film.  When Eddie’s alien eats someone, it’s always a criminal or otherwise bad person.

Noise is a prime element.  The film is noisy, and the sound system in the theatre where I saw it was turned all the way up.  Speed, and a frenetic succession of events, are also important. The film is entertaining.

What’s the message here?  Well, we have another evil mogul/mad scientist who cuts corners and doesn’t care who suffers as a result of his research.  By the end of the film, since he too has been taken over by an alien, we know he will be Venom’s archenemy in the sequel. Are we to think of Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates, or some other ambitious, power-hungry wizard of the techno world who wants to take us over? Another message is that Marvel has conquered the American film industry.