13 Uncanny Similarities Between Venom And Catwoman

Through the plans and intentions of the antagonist, both films attempt to say something and speak to a larger theme but wind up shooting themselves in the foot in the process.

In Catwoman, Laurel's entire motivation for killing people with the Beau-line products (advertised as able to reverse signs of aging) is to get justice on the model and beauty industry that shorted her. As a middle-aged woman, she's enraged by the lack of respect she gets in her field now that a younger batch of models has taken her place.

It's trying to say something about the danger of the emphasis our culture puts on physical appearance and the way it treats women in industries such as modeling and acting as disposable. Yet, the film itself spends a gargantuan amount of screentime ogling Halle Berry in a skin-tight, laughably skimpy leather Catwoman outfit.

In Venom, Drake spends the entire film droning on about global warming and how the planet will be uninhabitable within a generation, so they need to explore space to survive. Problems with Drake's character inconsistencies and eventual evil plan aside, the film is trying to offer a commentary on the state of our global and political environment. Hell, it even chucks in a 'fake news' line at one point. But the film never actually uses any of this for anything more than a disappointingly dumb 'the fate of the world hangs in the balance' ending that audiences have seen hundreds of times before.

In both cases, it's as if the films think they'll earn brownie points from simply broaching a subject and never actually commit to it, leaving them vapidly hollow.