journal features

movie review - Venom: Let There Be Carnage

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2022.07.09

In this sequel to "Venom", a sloppy sci-fi/super-hero movie featuring a human and his alien "parasite". Oddly enough, they made a sequel and are continuing to ignore the original purpose of the Venom character, which was as a counterpart to Spider-Man.

If the first plot felt made-up-on-the-spot, this one has far more emotional content. The bad guy is another human/symbiote pairing, and a dangerous mix of aggrieved and unstable. Naturally, the two halves click immediately and do maximum damage at every turn, while our hero/heros struggle to work together. And naturally, the human half of the opposition has a love interest, and she's just as unhinged as he is.

This movie is significantly better than the original, perhaps because it's trying to stay in one lane rather than weave between sci-fi and heroics.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner