Bender's Game

Just as with The Beast with a Billion Backs, I'm in a seemingly tiny minority who thinks this isn't half bad. Hell, the basic premise of the episode is absolutely brilliant, they just didn't pull it off to perfection.

The overall plot is poorly structured, I'll grant you that. What's there is great fun, it just doesn't work as a film and the fantasy segment, whilst a great idea, is purely filler that doesn't serve the overall story at all. But like I said, what is there is great and at the end of the day, this is more 4 to-be-continued episodes than a movie so the meandering structure isn't too much of a problem.

Especially as it's very funny. Probably the funniest of the movies. There's a lot of genuinely interesting new stuff to admire on the art-direction front and a nice reveal of something that I imagine has been building since the early days of the show.

It actually manages to parody the "I am your father" moment from Star Wars V and put an original spin on it that keeps it fresh and amusing. That's worthy of praise in itself.

If this was an episode, it'd be among the strongest. I think most peoples complaints stem from them expecting theatrical quality movies from the show's 5th season. It just wasn't going to happen.

"Bender's Game" is the third in the series of four direct-to-DVD Futurama movies and divides into two halves which unfortunately don't fit together very naturally.

In the first (and far more entertaining) half of "Bender's Game", Leela gets in trouble when an argument with a trucker drives her to steal the ship and enter a demolition derby, thus wasting precious dark matter fuel (and wrecking the ship). As discipline, Prof. Farnsworth forces her to wear a shock collar to control her anger. We later learn that Farnsworth accidentally synthesized dark matter while working in Mom's lab and created a pair of crystals which hold together the structure of all dark matter in the universe. In an ironic twist, Farnsworth decides to exact revenge upon his former boss and lover by breaking into Mom's dark matter mine and destroying the crystals in order to render dark matter inert, where a shocking secret about the origins of dark matter is revealed.

Meanwhile, Bender starts playing Dungeons & Dragons with Cubert, Dwight and their friends, quickly becomes addicted to the game, loses touch with reality and has to be committed to a robot insane asylum. Somehow, Bender's mental affliction and a supply of dark matter he scooped into his chest cavity lead to all of our heroes being transported into an alternate medieval world in which they are transformed into parodies of the Lord of the Rings characters. Ironically, the medieval half of "Bender's Game" is the weaker half and has trouble standing up on its own, as evidenced by an incredibly tedious segment where the medieval Fry ("Frydo") acts out a medieval-style informercial about staghorn-handled knives. Leela's anger issues and a very-poorly kept secret about Farnsworth and Mom's previous love life attempt to bind the two halves of the movie together, but neither story is particularly compelling at all. Much like its predecessor "Beast with a Billion Backs", "Bender's Game" piles a bunch of jokes upon a core plot which is not very well-motivated at all, and the end product becomes rather tedious towards the end.

Another bad offering for Futurama in my opinion. Bender's Game, unlike The Beast With A Billion Backs, has a strong first act, but everything else for it is below par. First of all, the twist with Farnsworth's son was too obvious, and they kept pointing it out like 3-5 times when we already figured it out the first time its hinted (At least with Lars you had to think a bit to get it). As for Mom and her actions, it got really annoying when she kept slapping them and saying the same thing over and over again. It only works once in a while, but doing it all the time is overkill. The jokes are pretty good in the first act, but drop tremendously as they are either repeated or are just plain annoying. Mom's sons on being Owl Exterminators for example, got really old fast, and became a hindrance in the end. Once the crew try to save the Nibblonians from producing ship fuel for Mom, the humour kind of picks up again, but when it goes back to the Bender subplot, it isn't that funny since its all been done before (see the Season 3 episode "Insane In The Mainframe").

However, once the crew enter the Fantasy world, the quality of the movie plummets to almost rock bottom standards. Constantly referencing Lord Of The Rings and Dungeons And Dragons doesn't work for Futurama! The jokes are again far too slapstick, and there's even some toilet and sex humour thrown in. These do not work for this show, and Wipe Castle? Please! What an insult! A castle that is a toilet! And that QVC advert with Fry, or Frydo as he's called, was made unfunny because they dragged it out too long. The humour does sort of pick up again though at the end of the fantasy sequence, when its Mom vs Fry as Dragon transformations, but its over pretty quickly, and then they reveal who Farnsworth's son is, in an obvious Star Wars-like fashion. D'oh! One of the worst offerings of Futurama, but better than The Beast With A Billion Backs. I'll give it a 6/10, just because of the parts before the Fantasy sequence.