EricNoah
Adventurer
Into the Wild Green Yonder, the last of the four straight-to-DVD Futurama movies came out on Tuesday. The timing of the release surprised me - it's great that it comes so close on the heels of the previous release - and so I thought I would alert fellow Futurama fans.
I enjoyed it and am certainly glad I bought it. It has many chuckle-worthy moments and a bittersweet ending worthy of the series. That said, it suffers from some of the same problems as the earlier efforts - in particular, the awkwardness of having four pretty distinctly different "acts" (so the film can be chopped into four 22-min episodes for TV) that at points feel pretty unconnected; and an overly plotty plot (lots of exposition to explain why once again Fry is the only one who can save the day - though the writers clearly know they have a lot of exposition to go through and make several jokes about that problem within the movie itself). I was hoping the (potentially) last ever Futurama outing would focus a bit more on the Fry/Lela relationship - and it does, just not as much as I would have liked.
I would say for the uninitiated, this outing is probably the least compelling of the four films as you kind of have to care about the characters and the whole Futurama "universe" in order for it to work well. It's certainly not as compelling to, say, EN Worlders/D&D fans who are not also Futurama fans the way the previous film ("Bender's Game") could, with all of its direct and indirect D&D/fantasy jokes & gags.
For fans of the series, I would predict that you will enjoy it but you probably won't find it the best of the four. I personally would rank the first of the four ("Bender's Big Score") as the best, and the other three tied at #2. But again, I enjoyed it and it held up well to a second viewing - there is a lot of good comedy and plenty of appropriately nutty science fiction concepts in this film.
I enjoyed it and am certainly glad I bought it. It has many chuckle-worthy moments and a bittersweet ending worthy of the series. That said, it suffers from some of the same problems as the earlier efforts - in particular, the awkwardness of having four pretty distinctly different "acts" (so the film can be chopped into four 22-min episodes for TV) that at points feel pretty unconnected; and an overly plotty plot (lots of exposition to explain why once again Fry is the only one who can save the day - though the writers clearly know they have a lot of exposition to go through and make several jokes about that problem within the movie itself). I was hoping the (potentially) last ever Futurama outing would focus a bit more on the Fry/Lela relationship - and it does, just not as much as I would have liked.
I would say for the uninitiated, this outing is probably the least compelling of the four films as you kind of have to care about the characters and the whole Futurama "universe" in order for it to work well. It's certainly not as compelling to, say, EN Worlders/D&D fans who are not also Futurama fans the way the previous film ("Bender's Game") could, with all of its direct and indirect D&D/fantasy jokes & gags.
For fans of the series, I would predict that you will enjoy it but you probably won't find it the best of the four. I personally would rank the first of the four ("Bender's Big Score") as the best, and the other three tied at #2. But again, I enjoyed it and it held up well to a second viewing - there is a lot of good comedy and plenty of appropriately nutty science fiction concepts in this film.
