Recap / Venom (2018)

In the dark of night, a space shuttle on a reconnaissance mission for the Life Foundation crashes into a forest in Malaysia. Making matters worse is the fact that, of four biological samples the team on the shuttle retrieved during their excursion, one is missing. The other three are recovered and taken to the Life Foundation's laboratory in San Francisco...

Enter Eddie Brock, an investigative journalist whose dogged pursuit of the truth caused him to leave New York (not willingly) and pursue a lucrative career in San Francisco, where his fiancee, attorney Anne Weying, also works. Eddie is given a job to interview Carlton Drake, CEO of the Life Foundation. Eddie has his suspicions that Drake is involved in something illegal, but his boss warns him not to confront him on his supposed wrongdoings.

Eddie's intuition cannot be stifled, however; especially after finding a document on Anne's computer about a lawsuit being filed against the Life Foundation regarding wrongful deaths in morally-dubious human trials. When he goes to interview Drake the following day, he presses him on the deaths, only to be escorted off the premises. Afterwards, Eddie is fired from his job. He later learns from Anne that his using the confidential lawsuit she was working on cost her her job as well, and she ends their relationship.

Six months pass, during which time Eddie struggles to find steady employment. One fateful evening, he is approached by Dora Skirth, a scientist at the Life Foundation who was suffering from guilt. According to her, his suspicions about Drake's crimes were spot-on: Drake was obsessed with the fact that the Earth was teetering on the brink of ruin due to pollution and climate change, and was conducting experiments involving alien "symbiotes" and humans. The symbiotes could not survive for long in an oxygen-rich atmosphere without bonding to an oxygen-breathing lifeform, and Drake hoped to successfully bond humans and symbiotes together, in an effort to allow humanity to leave Earth and live on other planets. At first, Eddie rebukes her, the Life Foundation being a very sore subject for him. After a run-in with Anne, who found new love in a doctor named Dan Lewis and was still sore about Eddie getting her fired, Eddie decides to follow Skirth's lead.

Skirth sneaks Eddie into the Life Foundation's labs to take pictures of the experiments. Within the labs, Eddie sees the corpses of one of the three symbiotes, who died without finding a host, and humans who couldn't handle being bonded. He recognizes one of the test subjects as a homeless woman he was friends with and, when he tries to free her, sets off alarms in the lab. He breaks her out of containment, only for the woman to pin him to the ground and the symbiote inside her to transfer into his body. With security bearing down on him, Eddie makes his escape, his strength and agility increased severalfold.

As Drake questions Skirth and exposes her to a symbiote that kills her and subsequently dies, Eddie begins to exhibit bizarre symptoms; eating any food he can find regardless of whether it was safe to do so, feeling extremely warm, and hearing a strange voice. He reaches out to Anne and Dan for help, who take him to a hospital for an MRI. When the MRI machine activates, the sound causes Eddie intense pain. After Eddie leaves so Dan can look over his scans, he finds himself confronted by a group of mercenaries sent by Drake to retrieve the CEO's "merchandise".

The symbiote finally reveals itself to Eddie, creating long black tendrils from his body to fend off the mercs. With the symbiote's guidance, Eddie makes his escape with the mercenaries pursuing him. Eddie manages to evade the mercs for a while with the symbiote's assistance, but ends up crashing his motorcycle and becoming gravely injured. When the mercenaries prepare to kill him, however, the symbiote envelops Eddie's body, transforming him into a hulking black monster that kills one of the mercs by eating their head before making their escape. Once they are out of harm's way, the symbiote introduces itself to Eddie as "Venom".

As the escaped symbiote, "Riot", makes its way to San Francisco and bonds with Drake, Eddie uses Venom and its powers to break into his old workplace to leave the evidence of Drake's crimes on his boss's table, only to be confronted by SWAT officers. Venom fends them off before seeing Anne, who came to find Eddie after learning that the "parasite" in his body is potentially killing him. Anne and Dan take Eddie back to the hospital, where Anne uses the MRI machine, and the high-pitched noise it generates, to forcibly separate Eddie from Venom.

As Eddie leaves, however, Drake's mercenaries capture him and take him into custody. Drake has an interest in Eddie, since he was the first human to successfully bond to a symbiote, but upon learning that the symbiote is no longer in him, orders the mercenaries to take him out into the surrounding forests to execute him. Venom, however, saves Eddie, having temporarily bonded to Anne to reunite with him. From Venom, Eddie learns that Riot plans to use Drake to return to space in order to bring the other symbiotes back and devour all life on Earth. Venom has grown to like Earth, thanks to Eddie's influence, and wants to stop Riot and Drake — a sentiment Brock shares.

As Drake and Riot prepare a spaceship to leave for the other symbiotes, Eddie and Venom pursue and fight him. Riot and Drake board the shuttle moments before it launches, but Eddie and Venom manage to stop him once and for all by rupturing one of the fuel tanks on the shuttle, destroying it, Riot, and Drake in a fiery explosion. Venom prepares to sacrifice himself to save Eddie from the fire by parachuting him into the water. Eddie begs Venom not to go as he drops into the bay.

With Earth saved and the Life Foundation destroyed, Eddie and Venom (who turns out to have survived the explosion) both hash out some ground rules for their new relationship; chiefly, that Venom cannot eat just anyone he wants, and that he is only allowed to eat "bad" people. They find one such person in the form of a gangster Eddie witnessed shake down a friendly convenience store owner for protection money, killing and eating him as Eddie wonders what they should do now. To this question, Venom enthusiastically proclaims that they can do whatever they want.

For the time being, Eddie decides to pursue a new story, travelling to a high-security prison to interview one of the most notorious criminals of the modern era: Cletus Kasady, a madman who promises to escape and inflict "Carnage"...