VENOM (2018)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

I was no fan of the Venom character in the SPIDER-MAN comics or the quasi-franchise that evolved therefrom, and so I had no interest in the adaptation of the character in the 2007 SPIDER-MAN 3. I deemed the whole idea of the alien symbiote as a lumpy conflation of the "Jekyll and Hyde" trope with that of the ALIEN franchise. 

So I was moderately surprised that I enjoyed Sony's reboot of the franchise. The filmmakers quite logically ignore the version of Eddie Brock that appeared in SPIDER-3, and this version of the raffish reporter, as played by Tom Hardy, is a determined fighter for the Little Guy through journalistic exposure. 

He's not especially smart about how to deal with eccentric multi-millionaires whom he suspects of killing people for his scientific experiments. Brock's life is torn asunder when he makes a rash accusation against Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), who gets Brock fired from his paper while also ruining the career of his girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams) for having facilitated the interview. Anne breaks up with Brock and he spirals down to Loser-Town for a time. However, one of Drake's conscience-stricken scientists knows that her boss is now exploiting poor people for a new set of experiments. 

Drake is the means by which at least two alien shapechangers end up on Earth. Even thirty years ago, no one could have imagined a private corporation funding a space-research program, but Drake is sort of an evil Jeff Bezos. He's obsessed with finding a way to mutate humans so that they can escape the ruined Earth-environment and conquer space-- implicitly so that he Drake can continue his aristocratic reign. 

With the help of the goodgirl scientist, Brock breaks into the research facility, so that he's on hand when one symbiote, Venom (also voiced by Hardy), breaks free and bonds his organic essence with that of Brock. Brock soon finds that when he transforms into Venom, he's super-strong, invulnerable, and able to leap tall buildings with just a few bounds. The downside is that Venom has erratic dining tastes, which include biting off the heads of his enemies-- though to be sure, the filmmakers play this down, to keep this particular ultraviolence from becoming repetitive. Meanwhile, though Drake didn't manage to capture the second alien symbiote, known as Riot, Riot gets the idea to seek out Drake and meld with him-- leading to a major confrontation between the two shapechanging buttkickers.

I'm sure I enjoyed Venom in part because it wasn't a political screed masked as a superhero movie, but the ultraviolent fight-scenes are appealing too, being less slick and overproduced as, say, most of the MCU battles. Neither the main hero nor his villain are characterized very well, but they both work as broad goodguy and badguy types, while the script finds one or two interesting things for gal-pal Anne to do. No wheels are re-invented here, but there have been so many superhero flicks that can't even get the basic elements right that VENOM is a comparative breath of fresh air.