BY: Kodi Robertson
Sony continues to hold a firm grip on the Spiderman franchise. Rumored to not have the Amazing Web-head featured in this movie Venom aims to prove that the titular character Venom can stand alone without Spidey. When the first trailer dropped, all eyes were set on their own computer screens waiting to see Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock morph into Venom. Fans were left waiting, wanting, and desiring to see how much more improvement was made since Spiderman 3. Make no mistake, Topher Grace did a brilliant job with the script provided and given circumstances of the film. Eddie Brock needs a bigger body to embody the essence of Venom. With any comic book movie comes the risk of always disappointing hardcore comic book fans, but how much disappointment is reasonable and unreasonable? When is it fair for fans to be disappointed versus when expectation is too far from reality? So far from what has been released, Tom Hardy has been an excellent choice for Eddie Brock. His big physique felt as if Hardy had been transported from the page into reality.
It didn’t take long for a trailer to come out with Venom finally making an appearance. Finally, after a couple of weeks of seemingly endless waiting: the symbiote showed itself and Venom dominated the screen. The fluid-like suit seemed grotesquely tangible, as if the suit was going to ooze out from the screen. Then we heard it, like thunder growling in the distance, Venom’s voice. Among most of my peers, the voice has been generally hated. Here now is where the expectation may be too high: voice over work can be adjusted before release, and this would not be the first time Tom Hardy has had some difficulty with voice over performance issues. Any fan of the Dark Knight Rises knows how hard it must have been for Hardy to speak through the Bane mask. By no means is the voice over, in the case of Venom, is Hardy’s fault. Sound engineers should be able to clear up any mess and issues before the movie releases Oct. 5, 2018.
So far, the movie looks in pretty decent shape, and then came the PG-13 rating. Sony clearly has not learned from the success of FOX’s Deadpool and Logan releases. Venom is notorious for his… questionable eating habits, so of course eating brains, liver, and kidneys is not exactly what one may call “PG friendly”. One of the driving forces behind the character’s standalone comic book series is the graphic nature of how Venom “saves people”. Anti-heroes are in their own way like outlaws, taking justice in his or her own hands. The PG-13 rating may be an open avenue for Tom Holland’s Spiderman to interject and interact with Tom Hardy’s Venom. All in all, it’s awfully hard to take such a gritty dark character and not let him showcase what makes Venom as scary as he is supposed to be. Without the R-rated nature of Venom’s character faithfully displayed on the big screen, semi-hardcore fans will lean with the hardcore fans and allow their expectations to find the positives this standalone film may bring. Come October 5, fans will either leave the theater happy they see Venom portrayed accurately on a physical level, or allow their high expectations season their regret of spending money to go see Venom.