I don't have anything to say about the election. To me yesterday was the day the new Futurama movie came out. Speaking of which...
Bender's Big Score, the first part of the the Futurama fifth season quadrilogy, premièred to mixed reviews. Well, not mixed, but not universally positive. It got a "lot" of flack for featuring too many characters and being too in-jokey.
Six months later, we got The Beast with a Billion Backs. It was criticized for not being as heartfelt as BBS, and for being too-- what's the word?-- gross.
And now, we've got Bender's Game. First of all, it is funny and it is worth watching, especially if you like the first two. But it's not great, and it leaves me a little worried for the next one.
Like the first two, the movie comes in an "eco-friendly" (that's a thing, right?) carboard box. Where BBS had a fancy hologram on its cover and BBB had a cool parody of B-Movie art, Game's box art rips on Sleeping Beauty, right down to the psuedo-metallic lettering and the color scheme of the villains. Right away, we know we're getting some kind of epic fantasy.
Thing is, that fantasy only takes up the film's second half. The first, better, half takes place in the present day (meaning the future). Like a lot of Futurama, that half has some great sci-fi concepts, like (spoilers) killbots that accidentally shoot each other, poop-harvesting farms, and an energy source rooted in actual particle physics. Like the others, there were some great action scenes in this one, though Leela's demolition derby felt like a less funny version of BBB's deathball. It set up a lot of great running gags (the shock collar, prune juice) and had great momentum. But halfway through, right when the story seems about to end, it takes a hard right into fantasyworld.
From there, it loses all of its momentum and has to start over. I think a big problem here is that they have to split up these movies to show them on TV. Bender's Big Score had a strong enough central plot that you didn't notice the chunking: on the second go-round you might notice where the breaks would be, but the story keeps moving forward, in a strange, flashbacky, way, and the ending is both exciting (big space battle!) and smart (clever plot twist that changes your opinion of a whole character!). Beast had its own pacing problems, namely that the titular character doesn't show up till the halfway point, and the ending just sort of fizzles out, but all the plot elements felt essential. This story feels like it's traveling in two different directions.
Let's tlk about that fantasyland. I jut saw it compared to Simpsons episodes like this one, and I think the comparison fits. But those segments each clock in under 1o minutes, not almost an hour. If they had found a better way to play the fantasy and sci-fi worlds off each other, it might have worked, and might have even been one of the better episodes the show had done. There are some hints of this, but it doesn't work nearly as well as the past-future interplay of Score, nor does it have as good a payoff (it has a payoff--Spoiler Alert--with Igner being the Professor's son, but it's too easy to see coming, and not worth all the effort). As it is, the fantasyland (the explanation for why it exists is one of the better parts of the movie) is just a hodgepodge of Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons, and occasionally goes too far into the reference-for-reference's sake type of joke we all get mad at Family Guy for. It doesn't have enough weight to sustain the whole movie, and the movie is almost complete without it anyway. That's a big problem.
This one has one of the same problems I had with Beast: the joke are good, but the big, heavy, emotional moments aren't well-thought out. BBB cleverly tied in some good character arcs, like Fry's need for validation, even after saving the world multiple times, and Bender's bizarre obsession with history and authority. At the same time, the ongoing Fry-Leela love story was completely ignored in a movie about love, the A- and B- plots had almost nothing to do with each other, and the central theme (love and jealosy) wasn't very well-developed, and was tossed out in a lame, ironic speech at the end. Similarly here, there are major emotional doodads like Leela's anger problem, Mom and the Professor, Nibbler's origin story and Bender trying to aquire an imagination, or that should have been good, but they either had no conclusion, or didn't get enough breathing room or weren't fully fleshed out, or resolved too early (respectively). If your characters are out of character for half an episode (most weren't, but some, most notably Fry, were), it's hard to do character development.
Plus, for an "epic," we didn't have that many characters beyond the main cast (especially compared to the last two movies). Doubleplus, this set doesn't have a bonus episode. It's not a deal-breaker, but it would have been nice.
I don't want to make it sound alll bad, though. Bender's Game is still one of the smartest comedy films around. The first half especially is incredibly funny. This movie continues Futurama's reputation as the best-looking animated show ever (a reputation I just made up, but try and think of a better-looking one-- only American shows count) , seamlessly blending CGI with 2D, incorporating great action scenes, and creating not one, but two distinct and visually stunning worlds (not to mention an opening that puts "Yellow Submarine" to shame). Thing is, I finished watching the last episode of Futurama, still my favorite of the whole series, knowing the movies were coming, and couldn't wait. I finished watching the first movie excited for what would come next. I finished watching the second thinking, "that wasn't great, but if the next is just as good, we'll be fine." I finished watching this one thinking, "don't let them mess the next one up, because that might be the last one we get".
Man, real criticism is hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment