Futurama: Bender's Game
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Caution: potential spoilers, I guess.

This is the third DVD movie based on the TV series Futurama, following The Beast with a Billion Backs. Um... the description on the DVD case doesn't really do the movie justice. I mean, I kind of expected the whole... thing to start alot sooner than it did. And that "thing" is a Dungeons & Dragons parody. Although to be fair, D&D did make an early appearance... Cubert and his friends were playing the game, and end up telling Bender he has no imagination. So he gets into the game, himself, and starts using his imagination. This isn't a good idea, however, because he soon becomes incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. Meanwhile, there's this other plotline about how Mom's company controls the world's dark matter mine, and she's been claiming there's a shortage, so she can charge more for fuel. But Professor Farnsworth has a revelation about how dark matter first came to be used as fuel, and he has a means to... make it not work anymore. There are two crystals; Mom has one and he has the other (an "anti-backwards" crystal), though he forgot where he hid it. And if they're brought together, um... dark matter won't work anymore.

But anyway, Farnsworth eventually finds the crystal (after Mom sends her sons Walt, Larry, and Igner to try to steal it), and the Planet Express crew (except for Bender, who has been institutionalized) infiltrate Mom's dark matter mine, and learn another truth about it (which isn't that surprising). There's also a truth to be learned about Igner, which is important. Anyway, a bit more than halfway through the movie, we get to the point that I thought would happen a lot sooner. Which is that something happens which... sends everyone to an alternate reality based on Bender's imagination. So it's this whole kind of D&D world, which is largely a parody of "The Lord of the Rings," though later there's also a bit of a "Star Wars" parody, and a few other things. Anyway, Fry becomes known as "Frydo", apparently based on Frodo from LOTR, though actually he turns out to be more like Gollum. And Leela becomes a centaur called "Leegola." Bender appears as "Titanius Anglesmith," the character he'd imagined for the D&D game. And everyone else shows up in various fantasy roles, too (we like whatever Amy was supposed to be, some kind of Galadriel/nymph/Lady of the Lake/almost mermaid type of thing named Gynecaladriel). Hermes was a pacifist centaur named Hermaphrodite. Farnsworth was a Gandalf-type wizard called Greyfarn. Mom was an evil sorceress named Momon, and her sons were Waltazar, Larius, and Ignus. Zoidberg was... eh, some kind of monster. And the anti-backwards crystal was the "Die of Power."

Of course, everything in this fantasy world more or less parallels the real world, most importantly including a secret about Ignus; and when Greyfarn learns that truth, the knowledge will later carry into the real world, about Igner. And like I said, it's important. Anyway, the good guys have to destroy the Die of Power so that Momon can't get her hands on it, so there's this whole quest, or whatever, which takes up most of the second half of the movie. But ultimately, everyone ends up back in the real world. And um... the good guys win? I guess? Though... it kind of... seems like a Pyrrhic victory, I'd say. I mean... pretty much everything about life in the 31st century would have to change, after this. So... I just hope the next movie, Into the Wild Green Yonder will address this. We'll see.

I dunno what else to say, except that as usual, the movie was incredibly funny and stupid, in lots of clever ways.