Apparently the third Futurama movie has been released on DVD. At least it came into my place of work, so I had an opportunity to take it home and watch it for free! No commercials! Free!
After suffering through both Bender’s Big Score and The Beast With A Billion Backs, I was hoping and praying for something better than the previous direct-to-DVD films. Those two efforts by Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and company were so bad, I didn’t even know the third movie was released. Considering what a devout Futurama fan I am, what does that say about the quality of the films to this point? (It says, “Wow, they must really suck!”)
The opening was strong. I found myself already enjoying the randomness of the destruction derby and the Dungeons & Dragons plotlines. Of course, it was a little weird to watch all the characters shoveling and carrying around dark matter when the show made a point of describing dark matter as weighing “as much as a thousand suns.” In another episode Professor Farnsworth says, “each pound of [dark matter] weighs over ten thousand pounds.” Apparently a few years later it’s possible for everyone to carrying that shit around like its weightless.
The main story that develops involves fuel conservation and the dark matter mining operation of MomCorp (run by Mom). The crew makes it their business to secretly enter the mine and destroy it. To this point, I was quite engaged in the film. Just before what should have been the climax of the film, all of the characters are transported into a different realm — the same realm Bender created during his game of Dungeons & Dragos.
At this very moment, the moment when the characters are transported, the film’s momentum stalled. The ensuing scenes were so bad, and so drawn out that I almost turned off the DVD and gave up on it before reaching the conclusion. I don’t know who created that storyline, but it was a horrible, horrible idea. I cannot stress that enough. The first half of the movie was actually really impressive, but the second half was incredibly flawed. It was way too drawn out, the jokes weren’t at all funny, and it completely ruined the experience for me. Those twenty or thirty minutes felt like an hour. It was so poorly conceptualized and written that it actually made me wonder if I’d underestimated the terribleness of the first two films.
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