Futurama: Bender's Game (2008)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Bender plays Dungeons & Dragons with the kids to prove that he has an imagination but it drives him into the nut house. Leela gets challenged and enters Planet Express in a demolition derby. The Professor puts an electric collar on her for damaging the ship. She has to convince Dr. Zoidberg that she is cured of her anger issues before he takes it off. Mom is driving up the price of dark matter but there is no actual shortage. Professor reveals he's the one who worked on dark matter for Mom. The crew needs to find a missing crystal which would neutralize all the dark matter. Then Bender's overactive imagination sends everybody into a D&D alternate reality.Nibbler's story recap is great and I like the crew's battle with Mom for the most part. Although I still don't like the scheme to neutralize black matter. I also don't like changing reality midway through the movie. I would rather have the whole movie be in an alternate reality or not do that at all. There are other minor quibbles but the cast of characters is still great. It's fun no matter how weird things get.

Beast With A Billion Backs Was Crap Bender's Big Score Is Alright. This Is Great. Bender Looses His Mind Due To Playing Too Much 'Dungeons & Dragons' & Farnsworth Exclaims "Good God Hasn't He Seen The After School Special" That Made Me Laugh & Bender Looses His Interlect. Mom Has Been Lying About A Dark Matter Shortage & The Remainder Of The Planet Express Crew Try To Link The Anti-Matter Crystal To The Dark Matter Crystal. They Get Sent Into A Fantasy World. They Joke Off Lord Of The Rings & Star Wars A Lot. This Is Futurama's Best & Funniest Movie. My Favourite Part Is When Bender Gets Run Dowm By A Bus Thinking Its A Dragon. I Forgot To Mention Dr. Zoidberg Put An Anger Management Collar On Leela.

Argh, this movie is so frustratingly bad! There are a number of flaws which will be detailed below. Basically, the Planet Express crew get sucked into some alternate reality after storming Mom's lair to save Nibbler and a bunch of other Nibblonians...but it takes ages to get to the alternate reality, by the time they do, the movie is halfway over. And then, the "plot" is mostly a whole bunch of pop culture references crammed down the viewer's throat! Enough already, you're referencing popular stuff, we get it, don't overdo it! And the characterization really suffers in this movie too. They take one aspect of a character's personality, and multiply it by ten, and suddenly, you've got a Leela who want's to kill everything and an Amy who wants to sleep with everyone, even the hideous monsters. Jeez, Leela hits people a lot in the show, but nowhere near as much as she does here, and Amy was never so...loose as she is here, she makes out with an Orc, a Mork (don't ask) and even Leela! That last one came right out of left field and was so ridiculously pointless, it didn't even make sense! So yeah, don't watch this movie, you'll be losing more than half of your brain cells, go watch the first two movies or the show instead, but not this or the next movie, which is almost as bad.

Direct-to-DVD movie; Genre: Animated Comedy, Science Fiction; Content Rating: Not Rated (contains animated violence and gore and pervasive scatological humor); Perspective: Contemporary (star range: 1 – 4); In the first DVD movie outing the folks at "Futurama" took on internet scammers and time travel. In the 2nd, dating and religion through an intergalactic monster movie. Now in the third feature-length film, "Bender's Game", they cobble together the energy crisis and Dungeons and Dragons. It's a melding that this time could have used a few more trips to the writing table to get it to solidify.In this self-contained adventure, the Planet Express crew suffers from the escalating price of rocket fuel dark matter, provoking Professor Farnsworth (Billy West) to go up against the maniacal head of Mom Corp (Tress MacNeille) who single-handedly controls the supply. Meanwhile, Leela (Katy Sagal) is disciplined for her violent temper and Bender (John DiMaggio) is accused of not having an imagination by the players of Dungeons and Dragons and is driven to robot madness by the game.The first act of "Game" is something of a dream come true. For the first time the crew headed by David X. Cohen, Matt Groening and director Dwayne Carey-Hill ("Bender's Big Score") take advantage of the feature-length running time to slow things down a bit. The first act is a refreshing turn of a character comedy for this normally lightning-fast sci-fi satire in which details set-up in the series are brought to a head, notably some repressed anger from Leela toward Zoidburg and her appropriately hilarious reaction to a shock collar, a somewhat clever flashback to Nibbler's first meeting with the crew and the long promised next epic confrontation with Mom. As possibly the show's best villain, it's welcome to see this Mom story finally realized and MacNeille is something of a powerhouse in the voice performance. This is her time to shine. This section of the movie is in flashes some of the best work the show has done.While D&D is established early and often, it still doesn't help cushion the wild, hard left turn the movie takes from its energy/Mom story to randomly and literally (and I do mean literally) dropping the characters into a D&D fantasy world. In this section the moderately funny, full of potential story is completely abandoned and the movie curls up and dies. Cohen, Carey-Hill and company totally indulge in their nerdiest impulses and to hell with the story. More disappointingly, they choose to parody some of the most obvious and mainstream fantasy sources – mostly "Lord of the Rings". The characters are put into a mix-&-match parody blender. All of a sudden Leela is a centaur, Fry is Frydo who acts like Gollum, the Professor is Gandolf who takes a "Star Wars" turn and Zoidburg is a giant cave monster. "Futurama's" strength has always been that it isn't mainstream. "Game" is a broad, easily accessible palette cleanser of toilet humor and forced gags after the sharp, iconoclastic and surreal "Beast With A Billion Backs" - which for my money is still the triumph of the movie series so far.The D&D section of the film didn't have to be a mindless lost cause. But the "Futurama" crew doesn't in any way make an attempt to resolve the first and 2nd acts of the movie with it. As randomly as our heroes entered the world, they leave it just in time for a quick wrap-up. The Game portion of "Game" is head-slappingly obvious filler that will probably send most viewers to the show's famously great commentary tracks for an explanation (Cohen and Groening give nothing). Instead of the creative or scientific explanation we've come to expect from Futurama, "Bender's Game" leaves us with the classically disappointing "It was All a Dream" ending. It's a punch in the face.The movie is randomly entertaining and I do love the extended mix of the show's theme that plays over the credits, but this is a hard one to recommend even to hardcore fans of the show.* * ½ / 4