Thursday, March 31, 2011

Futurama: Bender's Big Score (2007)

Written by Ken Keeler
Directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill

"I accept this Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Crime Robots everywhere!" - Bender

The show starts off with a few zingers at the expense of the Fox Network Executives, along with an explanation as to where they've been the past few years at the behest of the Box Network (their light flickers, making it look like an F instead of a B). The crew of Planet Express, while on a delivery to the Nudist Beach Planet, unwillingly sign a petition that includes their e-mail addresses, and soon they all start getting spam e-mails, and unwittingly sign over everything they own to the Scammers that got them to sign the false petition.

Soon enough the Scammers have taken over control of Bender's programming, along with Planet Express, and they discover the Universal Time Code that allows them to travel through time. Since there is no way back to the future with the Time Code, they have Bender go into the past, steal, and then hide out in the basement of the Planet Express building and wait, sometimes up to thousands of years, for modern day where he will deliver them the valuable historical goods he has stolen.

In the midst of this mind boggling time travel storyline, Leela meets and falls in love with a guy named Lars, and they plan their wedding. Fry gets ahold of the Universal Time Code himself, and travels back in time to the year 2000 to contemplate how his life would have been different had he never travelled back in time.

The movie has parodies of Star Wars, Terminator, and a plethora of other sci-fi movies, while at the same time incorporating all the beloved Futurama characters from Santa Claus and Hannukah Zombie to Nibbler to Morbo and even the Gangster Robots like Clamps.

After President Nixon is duped into giving up Earth by the Scammers, the world is in another Great Depression, and the residents of Earth are forced to leave the planet, and the Planet Express crew ends up on Neptune, which is Santa's home base. When Santa bursts in to punish them, he can't, he says his heart just isn't in it anymore. Leela convinces Santa to help them take their planet back from the Scammers, and he and Hannukah Zombie (voiced by none other than Mark Hamill) along with everyone from the Planet Express crew to Al Gore all get together and take the fight to the Scammers and it's one of the best sequences in Futurama history. After they're defeated, the multiple time paradoxes are sovled through parallel storylines telling of Fry in 2012 and the "present" of 3007 and how the two came to have the same results and how Lars fits into the whole equation.

Overall, a really well done movie, I'd even say this was better than the Simpsons movie, not only in animation quality, but in the fact that it manages to incorporate so many characters from the Futurama 'Verse into one cohesive, entertaining story. There are even 2 magnificent musical sequences, some of the best I've ever seen that would compare to the South Park movie in hilarity and quality. I'm glad Futurama is back, and with a bang at that, and I can't wait for the next 3 movies or the new season of the show. It's bound to be kick ass if this is any indication. Yay for Comedy Central!

"Finally, I get to save the Earth with deadly lasers instead of deadly slideshows!" - Al Gore (voiced by the real Al Gore)

8.5/10

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