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movie review - Venom

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2020.10.06

This is a sci-fi/super-hero movie about a disgraced photographer and the alien symbiote that he meets while breaking into a lab owned by a billionaire. The symbiote is an amorphous black puddle with a callous disregard for life, so they make a pretty good team.

Naturally, the material here can only be played a couple of ways and they seem to have chosen to keep it a bit kid-friendly but also pegged at maximum speed. There's a lot of cartoonish fighting that can be hard to follow, especially when they're screaming around the city at night or when the symbiote is fighting another of his kind (back in that lab). The plot is a ragged mess, and the whole thing is of debatable value since the titular symbiote is going to wind up a Spider-Man villain sooner or later (if they stick to the stories from which these movies were made).

Not recommended.

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The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.

—Joe Ancis