There is no need to qualify myself as a Futurama expert, it is ingrained in nearly every fiber of my being. But, I guess I’ll do it anyway, as this is the introductory paragraph of a film review, and thus it is the best possible place to outline my credentials. I would not hesitate to say that my intense adoration of the television program has reached The Saint like proportions, where I can quote long passages of each episode verbatim. I might not be the Sci-Fi loving, hopelessly single computer geek one might expect from a Futurama fan — I haven’t memorized the alien alphabet used in the show — but I’m pretty sure I could go toe-to-toe with pretty much any Futrama nerd in an enrichment-level trivia contest.
When the powers that be announced the return of Futurama to television, I greeted the news with the same level of cautious optimism that any sane individual would exhibit when something they cherish posthumously stages a grand return. I was skeptical when Family Guy returned to television, and it sucked. I’m skeptical when any defunct band announces a reunion tour, and I’m disappointed nearly every single time. Let’s be honest, the second coming is, quite simply, never as good as the first incarnation.
Shortly after David X. Cohen and Matt Groening publicized the return of the show, they provided details about a series of full-length movies that would eventually be broken into shorter episodes to be aired on Comedy Central. Whatever, I didn’t care, I was just excited about the possibility of new stories revolving around what are perhaps the best-developed characters on television.
The first Futurama movie, Bender’s Big Score, was pretty bad. The plot was interesting (I always like a good time travel paradox) but the execution was sloppy. Like Family Guy and The Simpsons Movie before them, the creators tried to squeeze as many second, third, and fourth-tier character’s cameos into the story. I’ve never quite understood why every show feels the need to do this. Old fans don’t care about how many familiar faces you can commit screen-time to, they just want to see a high-quality show. Bender’s Big Score left me entirely unimpressed.
An interview with David X. Cohen about The Beast With A Billion Backs had me excited for the second full-length Futurama movie. I waited and waited for an opened copy of the DVD to arrive at the store so that I could borrow it, but one never arrived. I couldn’t wait any longer, so I found a website where I could stream the film for free. I watched half of it last night and finished it this morning, and I was even more unimpressed than I was with Bender’s Big Score.
The story gets off to an excruciatingly slow start. Fry announces he has a new girlfriend and Zoidberg vomits in glee (from both his salt water and fresh water stomachs). Kif and Amy are to be married. Most of the first “chapter” of the film is devoted to this story, until the professor suddenly reminds everyone that there’s an impending problem they should be paying attention to. More dumb cameos by characters I couldn’t care less about ensue, and there’s a relatively unnecessary side-story about Professors Farnsworth and Wernstrom coming to work together on solving the main problem introduced at the beginning of the movie. Basically, the first twenty minutes of the show are a setup for ONE closing joke at the end of the film, and it’s not a very good joke.
As the movie progresses, Bender is given his own subplot, and the remaining Planet Express crew members are relegated to vestigial-character roles, dropping one-liners every few minutes just to remind us they’re still alive. The creators of Futurama could not have made a more egregious error than this. There are two things that make Futurama awesome. The personae of the main characters are beautifully developed, and their fundamental characteristics remained practically unchanged for the duration of the show. Fry is a complete moron. Bender is an unyielding dick. Everyone hates Zoidberg. The professor is crotchety and inept. When you spend four years developing a set of amazing characters who interact with each other so well, and then demolish it by suddenly changing interpersonal relationships and separating characters from each other with execrable subplots, there’s no way the end result can be enjoyable. And The Best With A Billion Backs — save for a few funny moments — is stale. The general plot is okay. The five or six roving subplots are dumb. The pacing is horrible. The characters’ interactions are stilted and unfunny. Commentaries on romance and religion have already been made many times before by Futrama, and those were done better.
Relative to what’s available on television these days, The Beast With A Billion Backs isn’t that bad. Compared to how good Futurama was during its tenure on FOX (1999-2003), it’s very bad. Here’s hoping the final two full-length movies are better than the first two.
Leave a comment