Tom Hardy's brilliant Marvel film Venom is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.

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 H. R. Giger's Alien in a gimp suit.

A probe crashes to Earth. Inside the probe is an alien life form called a symbiote, which can inhabit other life forms' bodies and make those life forms do stuff. Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) is a rich bloke who believes that this is the future of human evolution. Unfortunately, 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 fantastic-looking head that sort of grows over his own. But the battle is as much within as without. Can Eddie control the symbiote enough to make him a force for good? And if not, 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.