Rent Futurama: Bender's Big Score (2007)

Futurama: Bender's Big Score (aka The Futurama Movie) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

In the same way that Family Guy had a resurgence of interest at Fox after the success on Adult Swim and from DVD sales, Futurama also found new life. This aspect came in the form of a direct-to-video movie, however, but it still felt like a fitting continuation of the series. And, of course, the film doesn’t wait long to call out Fox for being idiotic in canceling the show.

In Futurama fashion, Bender’s Big Score is a tale of time paradoxes and heists. Fry finds himself becoming a target of alien scammers when discovering there’s a tattoo of Bender on his butt that contains the code for time travel. The scammers use the code to send a brainwashed Bender back in time to steal priceless artifacts. Once the aliens believe they have what they need, they order Bender to kill Fry, leading to a chase through time that alters Fry’s history.

The story mostly focuses on giving Fry another emotional arc and Bender some law-breaking antics to pursue. Through a confounding clash of duplicates, we get to see what Fry’s life would look like if he wasn’t frozen into the future. In this story, he continues to work at a pizza joint until he decides to work at an aquarium, harboring a love of narwhals while longing for his love of Leela. There’s also a rather compelling twist to the time-travel logic that implies the only thing holding back Fry from taking the next step with Leela is Fry himself.

Bender is his usual bad-boy self and now that’s under the spell of some sinister aliens, his rule-breaking nature can go even further. He robs from various figures in his history and does it with a ribbing wit while donning sunglasses for that Terminator vibe. His delivery is just so blunt and casual at the same time that even important moments as with Bender’s assassination of Fry are darkly amusing: “Hey, Fry, it’s me, Bender! I’m here to kill you!”

The animation thankfully hasn’t taken a dip for this feature, a fate that not all limited revivals can steer clear of. Everything still looks as crisp, colorful and loaded with visual gags as the series ever was. There’s even a money-shot scene of starships fighting back against the scammers in a grand and musical showdown of a CGI starship battle.

Also like the show, Bender’s Big Score plays a lot of the episodes that preceded it. Those familiar with such characters as Seymour, Nibbler, and Kwanza-Bot will be pleased at the progression and insertion of the characters while newbies may be left scratching their heads. Even if you have seen those episodes and characters, the writing is ridiculously complex considering the wild logic of time travel, clones, paradoxes, and universe implosion. It’s both fascinating and mind-boggling to fathom how such a story was conceived, planned, and implemented.

Bender’s Big Score was a decent return to form for Futurama. It has been a handful of years since new Futurama episodes were produced so the writers, voice actors, and animators were not too rusty when jumping back into the seat. However, the heavy reliance on Futurama lore does become a bit confounding, even for those who have watched the show multiple times (myself included). Thankfully, the comedy is ultimately what matters from such a weirdly whirring show of future talk, technobabble, and theories that are kinda-sorta based in facts here and there. At any rate, it was more Futurama during a time where there was none and it was good to have some of that sly satire back once more.