Venom 2 came out. I watched it. It got me thinking…
A lot of people love the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is a groundbreaking and consistently supported cinematic franchise that caters to all kinds of interests and is progressively becoming more inclusive with its casting and directing. It has contributed to the digital effects landscape and evolved alongside the action genre over the last decade.
There are also a lot of people who don’t like the MCU. For all its groundbreaking elements, the movies have homogenized considerably, rarely experimenting enough to ward off a sense of repetition. Some people don’t just want “a new genre.” They want a completely unique experience by directors that saw their vision through to completion.
So where do I fit in? And what the hell does this have to do with Venom?
I’m stuck in the middle. I love the MCU. In particular, I love its action-centric films that have tons of fights with punchy sound design and intense choreography. I like the ones that feel more like spy films or war stories than whatever we generally consider part of the “superhero” genre.
Sometimes, Marvel plays it too safe. They don’t hold on moments to let emotions sink in. When they’re weird, they rarely get weird enough unless the director behind it knows what they’re doing. I’m pretty impatient with MCU stans. You know the kind. The ones on Twitter that seem to equate being a good MCU film with being one of the SFX-heavy films that are great to get high to. All the while bad-mouthing more grounded superhero stories because they’re “boring.”
Nowadays, I think people look back on older, pre-MCU comic book films for comfort. The reason? They provide something different that might leave a more lasting impact. The old X-Men movies, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man series, Blade, etc.
These films aren’t perfect and for years they may have been considered popcorn films or even dismissed as trashy. However, consider the changing tastes of audiences and the shifting divide between critics and audiences. How a film connects with an audience can be more important nowadays than how it adheres to conventional rules.
These films may have been cheesy, campy, weird, and even downright strange, but I don’t think any of those descriptors are implicitly bad. Nowadays, I want more and more weird things. Some of my favorite shows and films of all time are weird. And sometimes, when a work of art pushes your buttons, it pushes enough good ones to make up for the bad.
That brings us to 2018’s Venom. I don’t think it’s a good movie. I don’t even think that enjoying it ironically is particularly easy to do. It has the allure of a train wreck. It is entertaining for the oddity that is its construction.
Who is it meant for? Is it serious? Is it supposed to be laughed at? It was a film that had no real identity. What identity it gained was given to it by an audience that loved it. They loved how strange it was. It was funny to watch a film that felt like something you’d rent from Blockbuster in 2004.
I don’t think the first Venom falls under what I described before. It’s not a great movie. A lot of its charm comes from mocking it. None of it felt intentional. It’s far closer to the critical perception of Pre-MCU films that dominated the zeitgeist. It was schlock. But if Venom was a curious diversion from the MCU, then Venom 2 is precisely what comic book movies need right now.
Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage was incredibly fun, funny, concise, and only a little baffling. It blazes through a well-paced 90-minute runtime, has a far better plot with themes of love and mutual respect, and embraces the humor of the first, this time entirely intentional.
It’s a love story about two couples. The first is between Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) and Shriek (Naomie Harris), the central antagonists of the film. The former becomes Carnage after having his DNA merge with part of Venom, while the latter is a mutant with a sonic scream, held prisoner by the Ravencroft Institute.
The film opens on the tale of their romance that began in isolation, a detail I quite enjoy. It humanizes the villains and makes it easier to understand them. It also adds layers of tension to a conflict when they fight the good guys. Speaking of which…
The second love story is between Eddie Brock and Venom. I’m not joking. This isn’t a goof. This isn’t even a stretch as far as interpretations go. This is a story about their relationship troubles and how they overcome them together. It’s a pretty direct story that goes beyond subtext into simply wholesome, normalized love.
Venom wants to eat bad guys and generally feels like he’s living up to his potential. Eddie, understandably, wants to lay low after the events of the first film got the eyes of Detective Mulligan on them. The trouble is that, with Venom’s help, Eddie got his old career back, so him holding Venom back isn’t quite fair, even as understandable as the reasons may be.
So they bicker and argue, just as Cletus becomes Carnage and goes on a rampage to reunite with his love before. What comes after that is anything but good. With a bloodthirsty symbiote inside a bloodthirsty serial killer, things can’t go anywhere good.
Venom 2 was directed by Andy Serkis. When I tried to convince friends and family that this film might be good by informing them of this, they’d ask “what has he directed.” Full disclosure, I haven’t seen a single thing that he’s directed. But come on! This film is a CGI fest and no one is better at giving life to CGI characters than Andy Serkis.
Accompanied by cinematographer Robert Richardson, the DP on Kill Bill, Inglorious Bastards, and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Serkis kicks ass here. This film is paced much better than the first. It doesn’t slog at all. It’ll feel like it went by in no time at all, yet the story itself will feel more than sufficient.
I was fairly surprised at how clever the opening act was. Venom and Eddie work together well and the way Venom puppets Eddie creates some fun and frantic scenes that set the main plot in motion. The direction here isn’t just embracing the oddities of the first film. It’s actively one-upping itself.
Maybe it was just that I decided to watch Venom 2 in a Dolby Digital Cinema, but this movie was loud… No, I realized my mistake in the middle of typing that – it was really loud because of Dolby. But I can never decide if Dolby is objectively terrible or not because I think the experience was truly unique because of it.
Having only seen it in Dolby, I can’t vouch for how it would be received in a standard show, but the first time Carnage roared, I was… thrilled. It’s how I imagine my dad felt in the theater watching Jurassic Park and hearing the T-Rex roar the first time.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating but the point is that I was properly hyped as soon as Carnage showed up. That said, Dolby needs to calm down with the bass boosting. Anyway, Cletus is such an effective villain that you hardly need to remember that the Carnage symbiote is a character all their own, mostly because they barely are.
At the risk of mild spoilers, there isn’t a conflict between Venom and Carnage until the grand finale. That’s something you won’t think about in the moment because the movie is moving along at such a consistent pace. I don’t think it even limits the potential of the story.
Venom 2 is all about relationships and compatibility. Eddie and Venom are the prime focus, but the failings of Cletus and Carnage’s bond work wonderfully in the story’s favor by its lack of development. When Carnage is revealed to be an entity unto himself, he and Cletus immediately get along, but only because they mutually crave carnage.
This juxtaposes Eddie and Venom’s relationship, which is strained throughout the midsection. But it’s how they come together that proves how incompatible Cletus and Carnage are in contrast. Just because two people have shared goals doesn’t mean they’ll work well together.
Oh, and yes, Venom does have a coming-out scene of sorts that, while played comedically given the context, is still sweet. That the film draws upon imagery associated with pride-adjacent gatherings to create a welcoming environment makes the subtext (or honestly just text) super effective.
All of that, plus some much-improved action compared to the first film and a positively juicy mid-credits scene that got me stupidly excited. If that were all, I’d happily say this was the greatest turnaround in comic-book film history but I still think some things were just awful.
The editing during action scenes could be choppy at times and create a sense of exhaustion in the middle of the action. Frankly, the fluid nature of symbiotes and the weapons they can produce makes a lot of action in these films feel cluttered to straight-up meaningless. It’s part of what makes adapting these characters so difficult. But, again, if anyone was gonna crack it, it would have been Serkis in a directorial capacity.
Finally, the character Mulligan was pretty interesting in the plot, but right at the very end, there was a scene with him that must have eluded to… something down the horizon. But it made absolutely no sense. Not a single person in the theater knew what the hell was going on. It came out of nowhere and was forgotten almost immediately.
Still campy, still off, but with far more self-awareness, I think this film might have done the impossible. It not only pulled the bare minimum necessary to improve on the last one but went an extra mile and made it a downright delight. If you liked the first film, you won’t be disappointed.
And if you hated the first one, I’m willing to bet this one might change your mind. However, I oddly do think that suffering through the first one makes this film better because at least you have a minimum attachment to these characters and the story between them.
Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage is one of the strangest phenomena I’ve witnessed in movie sequel history, and I can’t wait for whatever the hell they do with the property next.
Sakura/Shuffle 