Futurama: Bender's Big Score (2007)

The gang returns after being canceled for 2 years. Hermes Conrad gets decapitated. His wife goes back to Barbados Slim. The gang delivers a package to a nude beach planet. Philip J. Fry has a tattoo of Bender on his butt. An alien criminal gang scams the email addresses of the group and they get attacked by computer viruses. The criminals take over Bender and Planet Express. They find the secret to time travel on Fry's butt. Turanga Leela starts going out with Lars Fillmore who has a passing resemblance to Fry.It's great that Futurama gets a second chance. It starts with a fun middle finger to Fox executives. The story feels over-extended. At ninety minutes or four episodes, this runs on in the second half. Nibbler blasting the tattoo feels climatic which ended all the time traveling. The second half continues and continues. The narrative does not fit the three act structure.

I just finished watching it, and I'm not quite sure where to start. One thing I can say is that it was way beyond my expectations for the movie continuation of my favourite cartoon series.The main plot line is that a group of scamming alien nudists (fox has weird imagination by the way) who buys Planet Express and gives Bender a virus that forces him to obey they're every wish. The scammers soon realizes that the secret for time travel lies in a binary code in a tattoo on Frys butt. (Leela: What's the secret of time travel doing on Fry's ass? Fry: It was bound to be somewhere!) Since the time portal is a one way trip, they order Bender to go back in time, then wait until the present (since he doesn't age)to give them the loot. In the meanwhile Leela falls in love with a guy called Lars, and not to spoil anything I'll just leave that there. Also I'll neither spoil anymore of this story, although it would be extremely hard to try anyway. Oh yes, Hermes loses his body and his wife leaves him for Barbados Slim, but the rest of the story you'll have to see by you're self.Now this movie is obviously about time travel, and I must confess this is the most complex and clever time paradox movie I've ever seen. Although it doesn't make a damned sense, it somehow fits together and makes an entertaining and extremely intelligent film that is sure to please an every Futurama and Sci-Fi fan. And don't forget to watch the sequel: The Beast with a Billion Backs.Bender: Hasta la vista, meatbag!

Not that I didn't enjoy parts of this movie and it certainly tops the dismal Family Guy features, the story is a bit too in love with being clever than actually producing enough laughs. The first third is hilarious, involving Bender who stupidly downloads a virus into his system. He becomes a slave to the most vile, naked aliens you have ever seen, but hey, they are pretty funny.However, the subplots (and there are many) are distracting and though they come together somewhat nicely in the end, you wish you could just skip them and see more of Bender. Fry is given the most important storyline of course, but I think that the convoluted plot he's a part of does seem kind of boring. The big revelation at the end doesn't feel particularly surprising and it's glossed over with no real finish. Maybe it was too hard to find yet another reason to discuss a time travel paradox and we just get a repetition of the first reason.Anyway, the movie does deliver what it set out to do but you do wonder what the obligatory attack on the Fox, excuse me, Box Network is all about. Was it so terrible to cancel a show after four seasons? The Futurama nerds will probably say yes, but I am not so sure.

Terrible, TERRIBLE songs. Not a solitary laugh out loud moment. Series continuity is thrown out the window. A dull "story" that was just a grand tour of the show's best moments - bolted on to a supposedly clever and confusing time travel plot that was in fact neither. Racism everywhere, primarily anti-Semitism (the Scammers are obvious Jewish stereotypes) and the usual 'laugh at the darkies' rubbish you always get with Hermes and his family. Cruelty, disloyalty, mean-spiritedness and arrogant misanthropy masquerading as 'satire'. Which wasn't ever funny or thought-provoking. This travesty only gets 2/10 from me because it was well-animated. The almost universal acclaim this *extremely* poor movie gets just confirms for me that with fans you can put any old rubbish on screen with the Futurama logo attached, and they'll think it's the Dark Knight of animated comedy. And I kinda liked the series, too. Awful, just really awful. Did I mention the songs were terrible?