A Suit Personality

An investigative journalist turns into a big slobbering monster in 2018's Venom. I suppose this is the best live action incarnation of the character though, after all the hype, I was a little disappointed. I do think Tom Hardy is perfect casting but the villain played by Riz Ahmed is weak and the movie spends too much time on the perfunctory and silly romance between Eddie and his fiancee.

One of the good ideas was to move the characters from New York to San Francisco and decent use is made of the location. Eddie's now a video journalist, a much better medium for a movie character.

I don't like how Eddie and the symbiote are always two distinct personalities who can talk to each other. One of the things I liked about the character in the comics was how two personalities combined to make another.

I liked Venom when I was a kid. He was one of the characters I used to draw when I was learning how to draw comics. I think a lot of kids respond to how gleefully anarchic he looks and that imagery is carried over into the film well enough.

It was a mistake to give him an opponent that was also a human/symbiote. I also didn't like how the symbiote briefly attached itself to Michelle Williams' character. Venom needed one movie where he was the only symbiote/human hybrid around before the story started playing around with alternate variations. And I wanted a villain who really contrasted with Venom.

It also wasn't easy to sympathise with Eddie as someone down on his luck when he has a massive designer apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I really think we're meant to see this as a shithole. It's hard to believe we've come so far from Peter Parker's greasy shoebox in Spider-Man 2.

Venom, along with a lot of Sony Spider-Man content, is now available on Disney+ as part of the deal struck between the two companies to keep the Tom Holland character in the MCU.

Twitter Sonnet #1593

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