Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs
By fred | June 10, 2008
(DVD) Yay, it’s time again! As you all know the show has been canceled, but thanks to the love for its fans it was brought back top life, in the forms of four straight-to-DVD movies, which will later be reconfigured to air on Comedy Central as 16 half-hour episodes. The first Futurama movie, Bender’s Big Score, was released on November 27, 2007.
As you may know, I loved that movie, which I thought wasn’t just great and pretty hilarious, but also a made-for-fans movie filled with inside jokes and references to past episodes of the show. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to dive into a hour and a half of Futurama ! That’s right, it is now time for the next Futurama movie, set to be released June 24 and called The Beast with a Billion Backs, and that I was lucky enough to get to see already.
(And I’ll try to stay spoiler-free for those of you who haven’t seen it yet and don’t want to know what’s happening.)
And overall, I hate to say this but I am a little disappointed by this one. Now, maybe I was expecting too much from it, it is possible, but I honestly feel that this movie wasn’t anywhere near as good or funny as Bender’s Big Score was. Obviously it was the first one, and as I mentioned was filled with many inside jokes which may also have helped things, but this new movie didn’t feel as good as the first one, or even as the show used to be back in the days.
Let’s rewind a little. As the movie start, I was pretty happy about what was going on. And on a side note, I was also wondering about the opening credit jokes. What I watch was a movie, a one hour and a half movie with only one opening credits, quite obviously. But when it will air on Comedy Central, it will be split up into half-hour episodes, and for some reason as I heard the first note of the the opening credits and read the subtitle, I wondered about the three other jokes and subtitles I could be missing…
Then the movie begins, and it all seemed fine for a while. But it wasn’t long before I felt like something was a bit off. Not that it wasn’t funny, there were plenty of jokes and some really funny ones, but we were given a bunch of stories happening at the same time, yet none of them seemed to be linked to the other, or to even cross paths.
It’s not anything new to have in a sitcom different stories involving different characters, but here something was wrong. We had Fry and his love life on one side, we had Bender and his robot stuff on another, we had Amy and her love life on yet another, and for the most part it seemed like many stories only involved one character, separated from the rest of the group, and not to have any relation or link with other characters and their stories.
Sure, at some point they would all met for a trip or a new mission, but it all seemed to me pretty chaotic and dismembered. For instance, at some point in the movie we see the Planet Express team go on a mission to save the Universe, no less. Something they’ve done quite a few times in the past, so nothing new there. Things don’t really go for the best, and they fail. Again, I’d say this isn’t anything new.
