yet more venom things

fuckyeahisawthat:

I know I and other people have riffed on this in other places, but I think it needs its own post.

If Eddie Brock has one problem in the first act of the movie, it’s impulse control. He does dumb shit without thinking about the consequences. It fucks up his career, his girlfriend’s career, their relationship…pretty much every aspect of his life that we see going well in the opening minutes of the movie.

The whole first act of the movie, people (including the audience) are like, Eddie, for the love of jeebus, please do not do the thing. Even when doing the thing comes from a good impulse, like trying to rescue someone you know from a weird creepy lab…Eddie, you didn’t really think that one through, did you?

Enter the Venom symbiote. What is Venom? A bunch of impulses. Hungry? Chomp some heads! Doesn’t matter whose! Want up? Climb the thing! Tree, building, doesn’t matter! Threatened? Defend yourself and your host! Who cares what gets smashed along the way?

So you’re taking the protagonist’s main problem, magnifying it, and making it a character. Which is a great way to externalize and literalize someone’s internal conflict. And now Eddie’s the one who has to argue–with someone much more powerful than he is–not to do the thing, and explain why we should not do the thing, that it would be bad, that it has consequences. And if you follow this metaphor, the resolution of the movie is learning how to be in balance with your impulses. Which doesn’t mean squashing them down completely. It means knowing when they’re useful, even life-saving, and when they’re destructive and need to be reined in.

For a movie that has some pacing problems and clearly was cut all to hell, this is actually a pretty solid narrative arc. Like, on a basic story structure level, it holds together, and is a lot cleaner and neater than some of the structurally clunky blockbusters that have come out recently. (I’m looking at you, several recent Star Wars movies that are 40 minutes too long.) I think there are places where the scene-level editing could’ve been improved to make certain character beats clearer or land with more impact, but by the standards of current studio filmmaking this is…not a bad movie, on a storytelling level, and I’m starting to think lots of critics just didn’t bother trying to understand what it was, when it wasn’t what they expected from the marketing.