Review: Venom

Superhero movies are extremely common these days. Since 2000, roughly 370 different superhero movies and TV shows have been produced.

Some of the major production companies behind these heroes are Marvel Studios, known for The Avengers (2012), Disney for The Incredibles (2004), Warner Bros. for Batman (2005), and Twentieth Century Fox for The Fantastic Four (2015).  The top two competitors are Marvel and DC Comics.

In 2015, Sony Pictures Entertainment has started to become a larger player in the superhero world by releasing a new Fantastic Four movie. This reboot though did not end up making as much money as they wanted it to. Despite this setback, they decided to try again, only this time with a different film.

They have recently released their newest superhero movie, Venom, on Oct. 5.  Venom is a Marvel character, but the rights were sold to Sony when Marvel was almost bankrupt.  To this day, Sony still owns this character, along with 900 plus others.  Sony has recently decided to dip their hand in Marvel films outside of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), using Venom as their flagship film.

Disney, Universal Studios and Marvel also own movie rights to the remaining Marvel characters.  Twentieth Century Fox sold their character rights to Disney last year, according to money.cnn.com.

The character of Venom is a symbiote that lives in Eddie Brock’s body and is essentially using him as a host while he’s on Earth. Now, one would think that since Venom has his own movie, he would be a superhero. Think again, because Venom is actually an antihero.

An antihero is someone lacking the basic traditional heroic qualities, such as morality, idealism, and courage. They are also considered chaotic good, which means that they will accomplish their goals, but will ignore authority and law during the process.

Venom also ignores the law in the movie. Despite the fact that it is a superhero movie, it still had quite a bit going for it. The movie didn’t follow the traditional “I must save the world!” attitude, all thanks to the man playing the character of Eddie Brock, Tom Hardy.

Hardy is no stranger to superhero movies or to playing villains. In fact, he is most famous for his role in the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. He played Bane, the final villain Batman battled in The Dark Knight Rises.

Hardy brought comedy to the film. Most superhero movies these days appear more dark, gritty, and sad, like Captain America: Civil War (2016)and Avengers Infinity War (2018).  That was not entirely the case here with Venom. There were many scenes in the movie that are dark and gritty. Such as, fighting a whole SWAT team and trying not to die while fighting off Riot, but it remained funny when Venom and Eddie were bickering back and forth, which happens extremely frequently.

Not only was it a funny movie to watch, but the computer-generated imagery and plot were fantastic.  The movie was well written and the CGI used to create Venom along with the other symbiotes was simply incredible. You could easily tell the difference between each symbiote just by the difference in textures created with the CGI.

Avid Marvel fans know that no Marvel movie is complete without a post-credit scene, and an “end-end” credit scene. For this movie though, the end credit scene was nothing fancy, but it is certainly going to be leading to something, starring both Venom and Carnage.  As far as superhero movies go, Venom is well worth a watch and is scheduled to be out on DVD and Blu-ray in January.

Riley Bergman can be reached at [email protected].