[COLUMN] In Venom: The Last Dance, the Superhero Genre Contemplates Its Mortality | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for Venom: The Last Dance, which is not especially great. If you are planning to watch it, feel free to bookmark the piece and come back to it. It’ll still be here.

Venom: The Last Dance is a superhero movie about death.

This isn’t much of a spoiler. The clue is in the title. The film’s tagline is “’til death do they part”, framing the franchise’s romantic comedy stylings through a decidedly terminal lens. However, the film itself has a decidedly morbid tone. Army scientist Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) is introduced flashing back to her childhood trauma, the death of her brother. She reports to duty at Area 51, which is being decommissioned. There is something very elegiac about the movie’s set-up.

General Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is introduced overseeing the destruction of the base, dowsing materials in hydrochloric acid to remove any evidence that they ever existed. Later in the film, former hippie Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans) sneaks onto the unguarded remains of the abandoned base, a mythic space in the American landscape. “It’s all broken,” he observes, peering through the dirty window of an empty guard tower. “It’s so sad.”

The villain of the film, such as one exists, is Knull (Andy Serkis). Knull is the god of the symbiotes. As his name implies, he is less a presence than an absence. He is the darkness that existed before light touched anything. If Knull is not death, he is oblivion: the absence of life. He operates at a remove from the plot, acting through his monstrous xenophages, which operate against the laws of nature. They cannot die, reconstituting themselves after crashes and rocket blasts and decapitations.

The plot of The Last Dance, as much as the film can be said to have one, revolves around “the Codex.” What the Codex is and why it works the way it does is left mercilessly vague, but Knull needs it to escape his purgatorial prison. The Codex is itself tied to death. It is revealed that the Codex came into being when Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) was stabbed through the heart at the climax of Venom, and was revived by his symbiote, Venom (also Hardy).

There is a strong sense watching The Last Dance that Eddie and Venom have been living on borrowed time. The xenophages can lock to Eddie and Venom whenever the pair take the symbiote’s iconic form, and they will not stop hunting the duo. The only way to destroy the Codex is for one or both of them to die. The Last Dance signposts this very heavily. Once the stakes of The Last Dance are laid out, as much as it can be said to have them, the endgame is all but assured.

The Last Dance is built around a fundamentally incomplete road trip. Hiding in Mexico, Brock discovers that he is wanted by the authorities for the crimes at the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Brock decides that he needs to get to New York, where he can blackmail a judge to dismiss the charges. Venom looks forward to seeing the Statue of Liberty. However, the emphasis the film places on Area 51 makes it clear that the pair will get no further on their journey than Nevada.

There is a strong sense through the film that Venom knows that his fate is sealed. He talks to Eddie about the other lives that they might have lived, how Eddie might have been a good father had things worked out differently with Annie (Michelle Williams). At the end of the film, Venom sacrifices himself to defeat the xenophages, drowning himself in acid while shielding Eddie from the fall out. In the film’s closing moments, Eddie mourns his friend in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

Venom all but forces that climactic confrontation at the end of one wild night in Las Vegas. He takes his classic form to dance with Misses Chen (Peggy Lu), alerting both the xenophages and the military to his location. This is the eponymous last dance. While Eddie protests, Venom insists. In some ways, it feels like Venom understands that this journey must come to an end. The film doesn’t really work, but those scenes between Eddie and Venom are strangely affecting, and achingly sincere.

It is odd to see a blockbuster like this that is so overtly obsessed with death. It’s interesting to wonder why this is. It might be a reflection of the broader existential ennui that seems to be creeping into modern franchises. After all, the plot of Barbie was spurred by the title character (Margot Robbie) asking, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” It is perhaps an extension of the recent trend of big-budget blockbusters about the absence of God. Knull certainly qualifies.

It might also make sense in a broader cultural sense. The Last Dance opens in European theatres the same weekend as Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door. The two films could not be more different from one another in tone, craft, scale, budget and genre, but they work surprisingly well as thematic companions. In The Room Next Door, a terminal cancer patient (Tilda Swinton) asks a friend (Julianne Moore) to simply stay with her as she takes steps to end her own life.

These films are not alone. Michael Sarnoski's A Quiet Place: Day One finds a terminal cancer patient (Lupita Nyong'o) navigating an alien invasion and coming to terms with her inevitable death. David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds tells the story of a widower (Vincent Cassel) who operates a cemetery where the graves come with in-built cameras so survivors can watch their loved ones decompose. In John Wick: Chapter 4, the eponymous assassin (John Wick) marches to his own inescapable death.

Even family films are not safe. In The Wild Robot, the eponymous robot (Nyong’o) finds herself responsible for the care of a young gosling (Kit Connor) when her actions inadvertently lead to the death of his mother and siblings. In IF, a young girl (Cailey Fleming) still mourning the loss of her mother (Catharine Daddario) is forced to face the possibility that her father (John Krasinski) might die during a high-risk surgery. Audiences are being confronted with the inevitability of mortality.

This fixation with death perhaps reflects the aftermath of the devastating global pandemic that may have claimed up to fifteen million deaths worldwide and caused the global life expectancy to drop by almost two years. Over one million of those deaths were in the United States alone, which has also seen a surge in alcohol-related deaths, suicides and drug-overdose deaths. There is a strong sense that, as a culture, we still have no real idea how best to talk about the pandemic as a concept.

Of course, it is also worth considering The Last Dance in the specific context of the modern superhero boom. It seems fair to acknowledge that the superhero genre is not what it once was. Over the past two years, the genre has experienced a number of major commercial disappointments: Shazam!: Fury of the Gods, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Flash, The Marvels, Madame Web. It appears that, after years of warnings, “superhero fatigue” is real.

More abstractly, after decades of dominance, Hollywood’s most reliable genre is in a precarious position. There were high-profile reports of chaos behind the scenes. Actors who had worked on these projects seemed to feel more comfortable talking about the perception of the franchise, with Zoe Saldaña acknowledging that people “don’t like to use words like ‘deep’ and ‘Marvel’ in the same sentence.” It can be hard to properly quantify a “vibe shift”, but it felt like one had taken place.

It can seem like this anxiety is playing out within the genre itself. Recently Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie á Deux felt more like an elaborate cinematic troll than a superhero sequel, a film that oozed naked contempt for the systems that demanded its existence. Even more aggressively than The Last Dance, Folie á Deux ends with a sequence that clearly communicates that the franchise is over. Asked about the possibility of a third film to follow-up on the sequel, Phillips replied, “Did you see the movie?”

In the midst of all of this, it’s interesting that the one big Marvel Studios release of the year, Deadpool & Wolverine is so aggressively built around the rejection of mortality and endings. It opens with Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) literally exhuming Wolverine’s (Hugh Jackman) corpse following his death in Logan, and tries desperately to push against the general elegiac vibe of pop culture. God cannot be dead if Wolverine (not Deadpool) is “Marvel Jesus.” Tony Stark might have died in Avengers: Endgame, but Robert Downey Jr. is never leaving the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The Last Dance contains its fair share of franchise sequel nonsense. There is dialogue seeding “Flash” Thompson, a later host of the Venom symbiote in the comics. Payne is transformed into the symbiote Agony, suggesting the franchise will continue. There is a post-credits tease that Knull will return, perhaps in the next Tom Holland Spider-Man movie. Even without a faint tease in the post-post-credits scene, it seems unlikely that Venom is truly gone.

However, there is a very funereal vibe to The Last Dance, even beyond its morbid fixation on death. The film is engaged with the larger superhero genre. The plot is built around the reveal that the symbiotes are not an invading interstellar army but instead cosmic refugees fleeing persecution and devastation, evoking the codifier of the superhero archetype, Superman. This makes sense. At the end, the superhero genre turns backwards and contemplates its origins.

The Last Dance couches its superhero backstory in grand mythology. Knull’s origin story as the darkness untouched by light evokes the famous opening lines of Genesis: “God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.” The story of the symbiotes rising up against their creator, Knull, and chaining him, recalls Zeus rising up in rebellion against the monstrous titans and binding them. It positions the superhero genre as a modern mythology.

In doing this, The Last Dance feels like a farewell. It is appropriate that Rhys Ifans has a major supporting role; he played the villain in The Amazing Spider-Man, one of the films that kicked off Sony’s modern approach to the Spider-Man brand. After two movies set in San Francisco, on the west coast, The Last Dance finds Eddie heading eastward towards New York. It is the end of that great American myth, manifest destiny. There is no more west left. All Venom can do is retreat.

The Last Dance is not the end of the superhero. Sony will be playing trailers for Kraven the Hunter before most screenings. Next year sees the release of franchise-defining moves like Superman and Fantastic Four. Some of these will undoubtedly succeed. While most of this year’s superhero movies flopped – Madame Web, The Crow, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, Joker: Folie á Deux – Deadpool & Wolverine was a massive commercial success. However, the genre is not as reliable as it once was.

The Last Dance is a deeply dysfunctional mess of a film that never really coheres into anything especially compelling. However, it is an interesting study of the state of the modern superhero genre, and a reflection of the necessity and the value of endings. Everything comes to an end, everything inevitably falls into decline, and there is dignity in allowing a character, a work and even a genre to set the terms of its departure.