Venom ⭐⭐

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I am surprised that a movie based on the Marvel Comics character Venom ever got made. It seems like ever since the release of Spider-Man 3 more than a decade ago where Venom played a part there was talk of a movie featuring that character and even more recently with the Andrew Garfield version of Spider-Man there were rumors of a Venom spin-off movie then too. But over the years nothing ever happened and quite frankly I didn’t think anything was going to happen so I was kind’a surprised when this modern Venom movie was announced a few years back.

Venom opened late 2018 and was trashed by critics but it made a lot of money at the box office. Still, it took me until recently to checkout the movie on home media and honestly I think that was for the best. Venom does have its moments but for a relatively short superhero movie it drags in places and is kind’a boring.

Here, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a crusading investigative journalist who because he asks the hard questions is fired from his job and loses his fiancé. The hard questions he was asking were to Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a tech billionaire who while exploring the stars brought back a ship full of alien “symbiotes” that need to bond with a human host in order to survive our environment. Drake sees these symbiotes as a way to be able to survive things like climate change, but the symbiotes pretty much just want to eat us. That is except for the one called “Venom” who bonds with Brock and while it still needs to eat people in order to survive, agrees to only eat bad people and help Brock do good like stop Drake and his symbiote alien conquest.

I felt this when I heard about Venom and feel it still, but to me Venom and Eddie Brock are need to be the bad guys, but in Venom they’re mostly good. In the comics the Venom symbiote was the black Spider-Man costume for a long while, that’s why Venom has the spider-designed costume and shoots webs like Spidey. And after Spider-Man got rid of the symbiote, it found and bonded with Brock and became the anti-Spider-Man character Venom. Venom is one of the classic Spider-Man villains but the movies have changed him to a mostly good-guy and it’s just weird.

Why does Venom look like a spider and shoot webs like Spider-Man in Venom? Well, that’s never really explained. Why does Venom look monstrous? Well, that’s because the symbiotes look monstrous I guess.

All of which I could overlook if the story of Venom weren’t so by-the-numbers dull. It doesn’t help matters that the first hour of Venom is Venom-less and the big fight scene at the end of the movie, all superhero movies have a big fight scene at the end of the movie, is Venom against, essentially, another Venom.

But like I said this movie made bank at the box office and there’s already talk of another Venom in the works. Will that movie be as boring as this one? Only time will tell.

The Passage season 1 premiere ⭐⭐

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The new FOX TV series The Passage has a long and interesting history to the small screen. Based on the novel of the same name by Justin Cronin, originally the pilot episode of The Passage TV show was shot the summer of 2017 with an eye to be on the schedule later that fall. But FOX didn’t like what they saw and instead of cancelling the series outright sent it back to the drawing board as it were, replacing actors and reshooting the episode in early 2018. And this time they must’ve liked the result since the show is now the hub of FOX’s winter schedule.

While the series is based on the novel The Passage, the TV series does take quite a few liberties with the story. The novel is told in several time periods, the first present day where the vampires are just starting to be active and another nearly 100 years in the future where the fanged ones have taken over, driving what’s left of humanity into protective enclaves. While the TV series does focus on the part of the book that takes place present day, gone, or at least not present in the first episode, is everything else.

I left the first episode thinking that half of it was really interesting, but that the other half was pure crud.

In the TV The Passage, scientists have found what essentially turns out to be a vampire in South America and, after one of their group is attacked and turned, locks this dude up and begins studying him. In something that’s a stretch for even a horror series like The Passage, these same scientists find out that being a vampire makes you immune from all diseases, and that if they can figure it out they can make regular non-blood drinking people immune from everything too. But the scientists find that keeping people from fully turning into vampires is a lot harder than it looks and want to try the process on a child, because a child has more “something or others” than a fully grown adult.

And this is the interesting part.

The not so interesting part involves Brad Wolgast (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), an ex-CIA-Green Beret-Navy Seal-Special Forces type sent out to pick up an orphan and bring her back to the testing facility since there’s a virulent form of bird-flu about to descent on the US which will surly kill thousands unless the scientists can crack the vampire code. Wolgast picks up this girl, played by an amazing Saniyya Sidney who hopefully one day will be in something better than this, but quickly finds that he can’t go through with it and the two go on the run ala Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk.

I thought the idea of scientists studying vampires in a lab not realizing that the blood-suckers are psychically linked with each other, and are secretly infecting the dreams of the scientists at night, was actually pretty great. That alone would make a good series. The second part with Wolgast on the run was ridiculous. Like all the scientists need is a kid to run their experiments, and if Wolgast is on the run why not just find another kid?

Just as insane is the idea that the scientists are going to turn vampirism into a cure for anything since 100% of the time everyone they’ve tried it on has turned into a vampire. It seems like you’d want to do a lot more testing with something that has the ability to wipe out the human race that they are in The Passage.

What I wanted out of The Passage was either I Am Legend before everyone on the planet got turned into vampires or what Fear the Walking Dead should have been rather than what it turned out to be. But so far it’s turned out to be mostly network TV drama schlock.

I’ll give this one a few more episodes but have to admit that things aren’t looking too good for me and The Passage.