Futurama: Bender's Game

Although this one has its moments, it's probably my least favorite of all of direct-to-DVD Futurama movies, although I should note that I'm the only one in my group of friends who has that opinion. It's still just great to have Futurama back.

As with all the futurama movies they are clearly missing what made the series great, this is probably the best of the movies, closely followed by "Benders big score". They are well worth watching, but don't buy unless you are determined to have complete collections. It is the most interesting, yet in some ways the most pointless of the movies. You will leave viewing with a feeling of who cares, just like the other two movies in the series. I was realy looking forward to the futurama movies, as i really enjoyed the show, even far more than the simpsons, but the follow up movies are completely unsatisfying and the characters have lost most of their personalities, especially bender and fry. Plus it causes some continuity issues with the events in the series and reuses details of the episode in which the robots took over the world.

I'm the target audience for Bender's Game. A lifelong gamer of over two decades (yeeck, I'm getting old), I also know and love the book by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game. With the title alone, the Futurama writing staff is clearly letting me know this is the movie for me.

Bender's Game starts promising, with jokes about the rising cost of fuel prices. There's also a sly joke about Leela's anger issues, which are controlled by a shock collar. A shock collar Leela starts to find ... titillating. Just when things get interesting and this plot point could turn into something awkward and funny, it's dropped.

Bender discovers that he has no imagination and, aggravated that he can't participate in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, flips out Mazes & Monsters-style, renaming himself Titanius and wandering the sewers. He then gets sent to the HAL institute, Arkham Asylum for robots. This plot point is pursued to a point and then dropped.

Meanwhile, Mom (that's her name) has been controlling dark matter prices for years, but there is a means of invalidating her stranglehold on fuel prices. Professor Farnsworth accidentally invented "anti-backwards matter" which, should it ever encounter dark matter, would render dark matter useless. It just so happens that this anti-backwards matter is a 12-sided die. Hilarious, right?

As our lovable misfits build towards a confrontation with Mom and her Killbot goons, reality shifts and suddenly everyone's in a parallel fantasy dimension. And then we get, in descending order of comedic value: D&D jokes, Greek myth jokes, Lord of the Rings jokes, Star Wars jokes, Call of Cthulhu jokes, and did I mention the Lord of the Rings jokes?

There's actually more interesting material on the extras, covering all the allusions to D&D that have appeared in Futurama and confirming that the guys who write the show are hopeless geeks themselves. Unfortunately, they're not really boosting their own geek cred with this movie.

Look, I love Futurama and I love D&D. But this movie is all over the place, using tired, easy jokes for fantasy. I always identified Futurama as a series of in-jokes for sci-fi and tech geeks, which is a much broader category than fantasy gamers. The bizarre diversion into the fantasy realm isn't well thought out, isn't particularly funny, and not all that interesting.

Sorry guys. This is one D&D adventure that doesn't give out nearly as much XP as it should.

Movie is ok for Futurama(3 stars). But Case is very very thin cardboard and the disc just slides into a cardboard slot. I am tired of paying good money for movies and no good place to stored it. If I just wanted to watch it I would have put it on netflix. I like to collect my favorite movies/shows I want a nice case for spending 15+ dollars.

I thought the direct to dvd offerings of Futurama would get progressively weaker, but it seems to be the opposite. With this movie, they seem to be really hitting their stride. Bender's Game which borrows the title from the popular fantasy title Ender's Game from David Eddings series is a really good offering. Filled with so many geeky references that I sadly knew, it is fun just to watch the movie for that. Though it mostly covers the Lord of the Rings, many other popular fantasy and science fiction shows/movies/books are hit as well. I hope they continue with these movies, I will continue to buy them as long as they keep up the quality they have shown with this release.