Venom - anti-hero or plain villain?

thwip! whooosh! Kapow!

That is the sound of a web-line being shot out, followed by the swish of air as a man-sized object swings through the air to be met with the eventual wallop as a pair of legs crashes into the bad guy! Yes - spidey fans - I have seen Spider-Man 3 and it is good. :)

As usual, stellar special effects and fight scenes, Some wacky nerd moments with Parker and the usual screams for help from MJ. Considering she always gets captured by the bad guy, you would think she would get tired of dating Spidey! Ah well, Love is, as they say, blind.

All jokes aside, Sam Raimi has done another fantastic job with the Spider-Man licence. The script for the movie is good as well (I really liked the end battle) - allowing all 3 villains in the movie a fair shot of camera time, quite impressive considering its just a 2 hour movie. Naturally, Venom doesn't get much screen-time due to the back story having to be laid with Eddie Brock and the alien costume. Which is unfortunate as the special effects for Venom were really cool.

Anyway, in case it wasn't obvious from the above - I really liked this movie (I've always been a Spidey fan!) and I definitely recommend you go see it.

Now thats out of the way, time to get to the main point of this blog post - Venom.

WARNING - DON'T READ ON IF YOU AREN'T FAMILIAR WITH VENOM OR HAVEN'T WATCHED THE MOVIE AS I WILL BE TALKING ABOUT THE BACK STORY OF VENOM



Still here? Okay, lets continue...

Venom is generally considered one of the most popular Spidey villains ever created. This is due to a number of factors - including the back story. For starters, Eddie Brock was originally a reporter who had been misled - he thought he had an exclusive series of interviews with a serial killer. Turns out it was a fake. This was discovered by Parker and Brock was discredited and shamed - hence his hatred for Parker. Meanwhile, the alien costume just wanted to bond with Parker (it just wanted to be loved!) - remember, it is a symbiont and needs to bond to survive. The rejection by Parker is the reason it hates Spidey.

When Venom was first introduced, he looked like another run-of-the-mill bad guy - out to kill Spidey and do other bad deeds. However, as Venom developed, he very quickly became more of an anti-hero rather than an outright bad guy.

Basically, Venom considers innocence to be precious. This is because both Eddie Brock and the alien costume believe that Spider-Man took innocence away from them (which is also the reason Venom wants to kill Spidey). However, other than trying to kill Spidey, Venom generally tries to help people who he considers to be innocent (he even had his own comic mini-series). Unfortunately, he is less than scrupulous in his methods hence the anti-hero tag. This was the original Venom.

However, as Spider-Man is so popular, the character has been reimagined numerous times for new comics, TVs and movies etc. For the newer versions of Venom, the writers have changed the back story of Venom quite significantly. For starters, Eddie Brock is now trash. In the newer versions (and not just the current movie version), Eddie is deliberately lieing for personal gain - albeit his ultimate objective might be noble (eg he wants cash to marry the girl he loves - I tell ya, girls are the root of all evil!), his methods are definitely trashy.

Meanwhile, the alien symbiont has also become evil. It now enhances negative emotions like hate and aggression and makes people generally do nasty things. Naturally, with the new evil versions of Brock and the alien costume, Venom becomes unequivocally evil in nature.

Which is a shame because I much preferred the anti-hero version of Venom.