Venom, the Protecting Saint of Investigative Journalism (Review)

By Péter MARTON

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What you get here: three reasons why Venom may be worth seeing, spoiler-free.

Plus, after those three points, some observations about the plot (those are not spolier-free).

1. Hardly enough in and of itself, but still... Hardy!

This is not a European movie. It doesn't even have European settings (the plot starts off in space, Malaysia is implicated, and then we're off to San Francisco and the Bay Area).

But it has Tom Hardy, one of our own, I mean, speaking from the point of view of a good European patriot...

Hardy didn't stay put in Europe for too long in his life, of course. He made his leap into the big unknown at just about the right time. He abandoned his studies at the Drama Centre at University of the Arts London because he was given the chance to play in Black Hawk Down.

He had his ups and downs since, some of them self-made, but he's certainly had a lot of success and memorable roles in films like RocknRolla, Bronson, Locke, Warrior, The Revenant or Dunkirk. He showed he can play all kinds of characters and he's established himself as a really successful actor, which brings us to the inevitable... In Venom, he now plays himself: a successful professional who's had his ups and downs.

He does this well, and doesn't fall off the screen where he doesn't necessarily have to. But there's humour in the movie, which means he kinda has to, from time to time, and there's enough of a comedian in him to pull this off enjoyably.

2. Let's take a moment to pay respect to investigative journalists

Hardy plays Eddie Brock, an investigative journalist crossing every conceivable boundary (even that of decency, in his own private life) for the sake of a story.

Such people pay an immense price, at times the ultimate price for what they do. So even though this is not the first movie where the hero is an investigative journalist, there is value in a film like this. Russia, Central Asia and Turkey are some of the worst places for journalists, but this year (and the year ain't over yet) three investigative journalists were killed in European Union territory. Daphne Caruana Galizia (in the middle) car-bombed in Malta. Ján Kuciak (on the right) was executed together with his fiancée, gunned down in Slovakia. And most recently, Viktoria Marinova (left), a Bulgarian journalist, was raped and beaten to death. All of them were investigating corruption, and all of them could have used protection by a powerful alien life form, protection they didn't have.

The murdered journalists

3. The alien symbiote 

A good essay up in the most recent issue of Clarkesworld, by Julie Novakova, looking at parasitisms in nature, observes that "most behavior-manipulating parasites have more complex life cycles with at least one intermediate host, sometimes many of them and that’s something we don’t often see in science fiction." Here's a movie that offers something even more interesting: an alien capable of operating across nano and macro levels -- and one that can work, depending on the characteristics of the host, as a parasite as well as a symbiote.

And it looks really cool, just like in the comics. 

***

Things I found interesting (spoilers)

1. The alien symbiote doesn't seem to have a gender, or at least we don't learn about its reproduction here. It can inhabit both male and female bodies, and adapts to them in terms of its voice and its external appearance (when assuming its alien form). 

So when a couple have sex (which is a prospect for Eddie Brock and his former fiancée), and the symbiote has already been hosted by both of them, and can move back and forth between them, switching bodies at will... u getting my drift?

2. At one point in the story, a swarm of small drones is weaponised by private security personnel, and this is trendy-timely, obviously. Just the events of this year may constitute enough of an argument in this respect: At the beginning of January, a swarm of DIY drones was reportedly used to attack a Russian military base in Syria, and then in August something happened in Caracas that involved two drones detonating explosives.

The unfortunate thing about the film, and also the world today (spoilers)

The story makes important references to climate change, and in the not-too-distant future where it unfolds, humanity is already on the brink of making the planet uninhabitable. This is central to the motives of the Carlton Drake character as well. Which is really not so bad, but then I remembered something Venom says, inside Eddie Brock's head, towards the end.

"We can do whatever we want."

So how about engaging in a struggle to stop climate change? Especially when Venom it-self seems interested in the real estate owned by humanity (and real estate for Venom includes the human body).

But no. The premise for a sequel is set up towards the end, and it's not related to climate change. It promises action hero action (aha), and possibly some light humour again, with Woody Harrelson involved, but the climate change issue is forgotten, or put aside for the moment, for the sake of the franchise.

Which was always to be expected, but is also, at the same time, equivalent to, you know, humanity spitting itself right in the face, right at the very end.

Previously reviewed here on EUtopias and Other Futures: "The Mysterious Goat Buck" by Dezső Kemény (Hungarian science-fiction from the time of socialism)