Tom Hardy and Michelle Williams star in Ruben Fleischer’s dark sci-fi anti-hero adventure from the Marvel stable (but separate from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in case you were wondering). A reporter finds himself inhabited by a ferocious extraterrestrial, known as a symbiote, which looks something like HR Giger’s Alien in a gimp suit. A probe crashes to Earth. Inside the probe is an alien life form called a symbiote. A symbiote can inhabit the body of another life form and make that life form do stuff. Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) is a rich bloke who believes that this is the future of human evolution. The problem is – humans don’t seem to be able to survive the presence of a symbiote inside them. That is until Eddie Brock (Hardy), an investigative reporter, gets wind of all this from his girlfriend Anne Weying (Williams). He turns up at the lab where it’s all happening and vows to expose Drake’s human experiments to the world. A symbiote gets into him. And both Eddie and the symbiote survive. Cue Brock arguing with himself, accidentally poleaxing bad guys with his now extendable limbs, and sporting a rather fantastic looking head, that sort of grows over his own. But the battle is as much within as without. The question is, can Eddie control the symbiote enough to make him a force for good? And, if not, then can he at least persuade it to kill only bad guys in really terrible ways? Endearingly, the symbiote introduces himself as Venom. Ah, cute. Good job he’s got a cool name and not ‘sloppy tongue’ or ‘drooly’… or something.
Venom – Saturday 9pm on Channel 4
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/venom
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/venom
