Venom, the Best RomCom of the Year

After a bit of an Odyssey, I saw Venom, and it amazed me. It’s the best romcom of the year with the most unlikely pairing I’ve ever seen. Perhaps because Venom isn’t exactly in the MCU, it had the freedom to play with whatever it wanted. Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a journalist that specializes in unmasking evil corporations and hitting into the big issues. He has a splendid career, a brilliant attorney girlfriend called Anne, and a shiny motorbike. He’s famous, he’s happy and about to marry his girlfriend, but he’s a snoop. Being a journalist means to uncover shit from under whoever’s carpet. But it also makes him a snoop, and it can have consequences.

Meanwhile, the Life Foundation, a bio-engineering corporation, discovers aliens and brings them to Earth. Just because that’s a great idea and entirely safe. When the company’s rocket enters the atmosphere, it has an accident, and they have to retrieve it and help the survivors. And yup, that’s how Venom ended up on Earth.

SPOILERS: this review contains massive spoilers of this brilliant and shocking romcom. It features a human journalist and an alien symbiotic that needs to become a parasite in someone to survive on Earth. Stop reading here if you haven’t seen the movie. (Until now, I’ve just explained the trailer.)

Everything is peaches and cream for Eddie until his boss assigns him an easy report: go and do an interview with the big boss of the Life Foundation. He needs to go there and just do a simple meeting. That’s all. However, at night, he peeps into his girlfriend’s computer and finds some evidence about the malpractices of the company. Anne is a district attorney and is working in one of the claims against the said corporation. However, she cannot show or say anything to Eddie, or her career would suffer. But Eddie cannot help himself from taking a look at her computer, and he finds evidence that ends up using in the interview. Drake, the big boss of the Life Foundation, stops the interview and finishes Eddie’s career. Drake is super rich, has too many influences, and it doesn’t matter that Eddie is a star journalist, he goes down.

To make matters worse, he breaks with Anne who cannot trust him anymore. So, he ends up alone, with his shiny motorbike, and living in a small apartment in Chinatown. Bills are piling up, and his life is shit. Despite this, the dude takes time for his homeless friend and helps her. He also goes shopping groceries in a Chinese shop. He feels terrible because he cannot help the owner (she’s mugged regularly). And he has to deal with a very noisy neighbor. Still, he endures and carries on. The problem is: he cannot find any type of job.

Dora, one of the scientists of the Life Foundation, ends up tracking Eddie and contacting him. She tells him about the experiments in the lab. They’re experimenting with homeless people, and they’re dying. She gives him her contact. At the beginning Eddie refuses, but soon his journalistic persona cannot resist it anymore, plus he wants to return the favor to Drake. Dora helps him enter into the facility, and when a security guard almost catches them, she leaves him alone to inspect the place where they human experiments are. Despite Dora telling him not to touch anything, he ends up crashing one of the rooms where he finds his homeless female friend. After some struggle with her, Venom leaves the homeless and enters into Eddie who doesn’t understand at all what’s going on.

When he flees from the building, he has superpowers. Still, he doesn’t get that he’s super powerful. He goes to his apartment and is dying of hunger. But nothing he eats is good. So, desperate, he ends up contacting his ex-girlfriend who is now going out with a doctor. His first reaction is to show to her the pictures he took at the Life Foundation. But soon he notices all the food in the restaurant where Anne and her new boyfriend are. He does crazy things, including entering the seafood tank with clothes and all. Anne and Dan bring Eddie to the hospital to find out what’s up. And Dan finds a parasite. What he does is simple: he gives him some meds.

Eddie returns to his apartment and ends up asking the neighbor to cool it. He doesn’t realize that he has shown a Venomized face to him. Naturally, the neighbor freaks out and stops playing the guitar. When he thinks he’s going to be cool and chill at home, he ends up surrounded by people from the Life Foundation. Dora gave Drake his name thinking that the man had changed. Instead, after killing her by letting one of the symbiotes in captivity eat her, he sends a group of guys to retrieve Venom from Eddie. It’s now that Eddie can see and hear Venom for the first time. He goes into combat, and it’s both hilarious and incredible. The chase scene is fantastic. Alas, Venom is still thinking about food and ends up taking a human snack. Eddie is horrified. When they’re far away from danger, Venom appears to him and tells him: “you’re a loser. Ah, by the way, we have this magnificent plan to come here and eat you all.”

The first thing Eddie wants is to get rid of Venom as soon as possible. He finds Anne, and she brings him to the hospital where she uses the scan to take Venom out from him. Venom is sensitive to a particular frequency, so he ends up exiting Eddie. But, he escapes the room and ends up in a dog. Too bad they were followed, and Life Foundation takes Eddie.

Eddie is strapped on a desk, and he meets Drake again. Drake has melted with the boss of the symbiotes, Riot. He will pilot another rocket and bring many comrades to take Earth. When he realizes that Venom isn’t in Eddie and that Eddie has no idea where Venom is, he orders his men to kill him in the woods. Fortunately for Eddie, Venom has fallen in love with him and will do anything for him. That includes getting into Anne and arriving in time to save him. After a long passionate (and very deep-tongued kiss), Venom returns to Eddie. He explains to him that Eddie has changed him, and now he’s ready to save the Earth. There’s just one problem: Venom was another loser in his planet and Riot is amazingly strong. So, the possibilities for success are pretty dim. Despite that, Venom and Eddie decide to go after Riot once and for all.

Expect an amazing fight. Speed forward, Venom wins, but everybody thinks that he died because there was an explosion and he’s sensitive to fire. After a while, Eddie is redeemed: he was right. When he meets with Anne again, they talk, but at a certain point, she isn’t sure Venom is dead for the better. Venom is in Eddie, and they’re having a brilliant relationship together. Seriously, they look like a married couple.

The movie is a little bit slow at the beginning for my test. I also found that Anne finding a new guy in her life in just six months was too fast. However, I loved the movie to bits because Eddie is a guy that, even making mistakes, is as strong as committed. You won’t see any toxic masculinity in the film, and despite some cliches, this Superhero movie is superb. The relationship between Venom and Eddie starts as an accident and then we can see how Eddie is beginning to think less in “I” and more in “We.” How Venom and Eddie change their personalities is also very interesting. They’re both very different, but Venom falls for Eddie, and that’s how the world was saved: because of love.

When you see the movie, the script will blow you away. Well, the bits and pieces of Eddie and Venom. No wonder, Twitter and Tumblr are all on fire with Veddie (aka Symbrock). Forget “We are Groot.” The new wave is “We are Venom.”

It’s true that the design of Venom is quite gross. But, after you see the movie, Veddie becomes a thing of its own, and Venom starts to be cute. Because let’s be real: he’s cute.

Copyright: Images on this post (C) Venom (C) Marvel / Memes & Gifs (C) by their owners.