I watched Venom this weekend and as it’s SF related (more or less), I thought I’d leave a review.

They spend a lot of time showing that Venom/Eddie Brock isn’t a “hero.”  At the same time, they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make you empathize with him.  It works, it’s not badly done, but as with a certain scene in the movie, “He doth protest too much.”

The action is fast and relatively easy to follow, there’s very little of the shaky-cam that ruined so many action movies.  The humor is good.  The story is… okay.  It’s standard comic-book level.  The science could be worse.

It’s overall a solid movie.  I Iike Venom/Eddie Brock as a character.  There’s lots of potential to move on, and the weakness of hunger is pretty interesting.  There was a moment in the movie where I was really interested by the potential implications of certain things.

My wife and I came away from it with really nothing to talk about, oddly enough.  They didn’t do anything bad.  Everything was good enough that I didn’t really have any real complaints.  The bad guy was solidly evil.  The good guy had enough empathy scenes that you can go along with him doing some horrid things.  There’s a few nonsensical things, like where he brutally beats down some cops (slamming a few through concrete walls and throwing some twenty feet or more), only to hold back Venom from eating one of them (dude, you just killed all of them anyway…)

Those scenes aside, there’s nothing that didn’t really work.  The bad guy was totally creepy.  The good guy was sufficiently fun.  Tom Hardy can’t do a Brooklyn accent.  It’s a good movie for a night out.  I’d recommend it, but it’s a fairly mindless action movie where the good guy is willing to do some really horrid things (but you forget about them, because most happen off scene).  Is it worth seeing in theaters?  That’s for you to decide.