Futurama: Bender's Big Score
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Caution!: Potential spoilers maybe!

This is the first of four DVD movies to be released based on the TV series Futurama. The movie is chock-full of things you will love if you are a fan of the TV series. That's not an opinion, it's a scientific fact. A lot of it is mind-numbingly obvious stuff, and alot of it is semi-obscure. Or not. But either way, there's just lots of stuff. Stuff that recalls stuff that happened throughout the series. And anyone who's watched the series will know, the series does a lot of stuff that can mess with your head. Stuff with time travel, for example, and boy, there's a lot of that in this movie.

It starts simply enough, with a flashy introduction to the characters you already know and love. And then a joke about the Planet Express delivery service having been cancelled by the "Box Network," but then about the network executives being fired and beaten and killed. And so Planet Express is back on the air... delivering packages. And so then there's a cool new opening credits sequence. Right after Hermes dies. But he could get his body fixed and his head reattached maybe. But his wife leaves him anyway, for Barbados Slim. Meanwhile, the crew makes a delivery to the nude beach planet. And then they all get scammed by alien internet scammers. And the Professor loses the company to them. And Bender downloads a virus that makes him their willing slave.

Also Leela falls in love with a guy named Lars, which of course upsets Fry (because he's in love with her, in case you never watched the show, which if you didn't, this movie won't make the remotest bit of sense to you, anyway). Although I always had my suspicion about Lars, which I turned out to be right in the end. So I won't tell you what my suspicion was! But anyway, he worked in the head museum I guess, and also was involved with the whole thing about how Hermes needed to get his head reattached to his body, though of course his head spent much of the movie in a jar. Also it seems the aliens had a gland that lets them sniff out information, and so they find information that was encoded in a tattoo on Fry's ass, a tattoo that looked like Bender. This information gave them the ability to call up this bubble that could send them to any point in the past, but couldn't return them to the future. So Bender decided to go to the past and then just wait through the centuries for it to become the present again, which totally reminded me of Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Or whichever one of the books that happened in, I forget.

Anyway, what his new masters had Bender do was go back and steal all the treasures of the past for them. Eventually they control all the wealth on the planet, and even scam control of the planet from President Nixon, and they send everyone to Neptune. Which you may recall, is where the evil Robot Santa lives. But not before Fry went back in time to the year 2000, and started a new old life there as if he'd never left in the first place. Though the aliens send Bender back to terminate him, Terminator-style. Now the important thing is, a hell of a lot of time traveling happens, which always seems to mean there are duplicates of people, which creates paradoxes which are always resolved by those duplicates being doomed to die somehow. And it gets incredibly complicated.

So incredibly complicated that if I tried to explain it on paper, even the metaphorical paper that is the computer screen you're most likely reading this review on, your head might explode. Probably not, but that's a convenient excuse for my not trying to explain everything very well. The real reason is I can't remember it, because it's too complicated to remember everything even while you're watching it, let alone a few minutes after the movie ended and you start typing up a review of it. But suffice to say, a lot of paradoxical duplicates die. And everyone on Neptune stages an attack to take back Earth. And eventually Fry returns to the future. But we also get to see what happened to Fry in the past. It involved a narwhal named Leelu. And stuff. And you know, all sorts of different plot threads from different times intersecting in different ways to make everything more confusing.

Eventually everything goes back to normal and all the paradoxes are explained away or whatever. Yes, a very happy ending pretty much, until a rift in time and space occurs, and that's how it ends. So I'm hoping this will be explained in the next movie, The Beast with a Billion Backs, maybe....