From Dreaming to Running: Putting the Android on Screen

Last week I got to attend a very nice panel from DePaul and One Book One Chicago: three scholars discussing aspects of adaptation, with Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Scott's Blade Runner as the focus.

Paul Booth (who runs the wonderful DePaul Pop Culture Conference, among other virtues) chaired the panel. These were really engaging, fast-moving talks, with lots of visual aids, so notes below are just sketches and highlights.

Thoughts on "Venom" (2018)

What a strange mess of a movie. If it had been just a little bit worse, it would have been more enjoyable—never quite good enough to be immersively entertaining, never quite bad enough that you can laugh at it.

Really the film's only strong feature is Tom Hardy, an unusually vulnerable Eddie Brock. Hardy plays up the character's slight dopiness rather than focusing on the tough guy that you can tell even this film thinks he is at times, keeping a strangely amiable, roll-with it attitude even as things get pretty bonkers.

But what a mess of a film. Pacing is all but nonexistent, with the alien symbiote visibly tentacle-possessing people within the first minute or two. It wants to be a shockingly violent movie, but is incapable of achieving that within the bounds of a PG-13 rating; it wants to capture the character Venom's gross-out cannibal comedy allure, but doesn't know how to achieve that beyond a few hard-to-hear voiceover lines; and most of all it wants to transform a monster we've barely had a chance to meet into an anti-hero we're rooting for, and fails quite remarkably. Venom's "change of heart" is the moment that this film really falls apart: not only is there no plot or visible development leading to this massive 180 in the character, but it's literally just stated, flat out, in a voiceover, "I will save this planet rather than destroy it"—incredibly easy to miss, and never explained or justified.