Beast with a Billion Backs Official Review Thread

Topic: The Matrix...It's like it's from another millennium

Users: @SuzyQ

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[Archonix]

There are, *ahem* "naughty" copies floating around already so I know some people will ahve seen it. I'm waiting until the release to actually watch it, personally, but feel free to spoil us all with every moment of it if you've already had a chance to watch.

I'm nervous about the plot. The few spoilers I have seen seem to indicate that they've dicked around with the characters again. I really hope they don't screw up...

Anyway, off you go.

[Stretch Dude]

Bought it today. I liked it. It's not Holy $#!+ Smack You On Your Ass Awesome, but it's entertaining.

Spoiler (hover to show)

There's a few genuine guffaw moments (such as Kif punching Zapp in the gut), and Bender casually performs his most heinous act to date. (Bender's B-plot, by the way, though only tangentially related to the tentacle-monster plot, is really funny.)

Speaking of the titular tentacled terror, shklee's a fairly amusing character. Having shklis own pronouns helps immensely.

And the preview for "Bender's Game"... Can't say I was expecting that. Looks pretty damn funny, though.

[Lisabella]

Got my rental copy today - some briefish thoughts:

Spoiler (hover to show)

Frama's had a tendancy to be romantic before - I'm not surprised they did very well on a movie entirely foccused on love.

1: The Kif/Amy subplot actually made me sniffly!  They're married, yay!  And Kif has his backbone back! 

2: The Fry storyline provided a nice break in the whole Fry/Leela boomerang. 

3: Bender's subplot was decidedly actually funny.

Really great overall, and highly reccomended viewing-wise.

[Archonix]

The spoilers I'm reading elsewhere seem to tell me that the Fry!Leela relationship becomes very negatively passionate. So still passionate, but in the wrong direction... I shall see if this is true when I get to watch it, whenever that may be. I decided to be good and wait for the actual DVD to arrive.

It may be some time...

[Lisabella]

*nods* it's quite a change from the usual push-pull they do.

[gkscotty]

... what de hell did I just watch?

[A Spy in Mancunia]

I'm watching it as we speak. (Well, it's on pause at the moment.)

Of course I'll have to suspend judgement until I've seen it all, but while it isn't perfect by any means, it's so much better than "Bender's Big Score" it's not even funny.

[Archonix]

Welp, time to register my disgust...

Spoiler (hover to show)

Ok, so the whole "lets go on a date with Yivo" segment and subsequent proposal is... annoying. If they'd somehow carried on with the idea of Fry becoming corrupted by the power he was wielding, and made Yivo more menacing - and possibly even gone for the whole naive alien angle too - I think it could have been a much better overall story.  IMO, of course.

It seemed a teensy bit out of character for Fry to be so vindictive toward Colleen but I figure he was heavily influenced by Yivo at the time. The scene where she was dragged in and "converted" was actually quite dramatic. I think if they'd gone a tiny bit darker, dropped all the rapist excuse jokes and made Yivo into a truly alien antagonist, it would have felt a lot more coherent. It just felt like they switched gears about half way through and it really jarred me. I'm trying to think of how to word my ideas but it's a bit hard at the moment...

Leela's abrupt acceptance of the whole situation right near the end felt contrived as well. That final segment should have been longer, again dumping the whole "Yivo proposed" part to accommodate it. Trying to make Yivo sympathetic doesn't work the way they did it.

I'll be back with more thoughts when I can actually assemble them into something a little more understandable.

[Red_Line]

I was really disappointed with it.  To be sure, it had some good stuff - the Bender sub plot as already mentioned was the best part of the movie.  The whole Yivo thing was just bad and got worse as it went on.

Fry - where do I start - it's season two all over again.    Let's just ignore every bit of character and plot development that happened in seasons 3 and 4 and BBS.   And {quoting Archonix's spoiler} "... a teensy bit out of character ..." {/quote}???  *bangs head on cinder block wall*  It was so far out of character I was looking for the malfunctioning transporter and his good twin to show up - "under the influence" doesn't even begin to excuse it. 

Leela - well, she hung on pretty well right up until the end, and then she caved. 

I give it a D.  Bender's Big Score was WAY better than this thing.

[Archonix]

Just an itty bitty bit, yes.

[gkscotty]

Caitlyn was one of the things that initially annoyed me the most, actually. It seemed to go a bit like this...

FRY: Hey there, this is my new girlfriend.
LEELA: I've heard a lot about you!
AUDIENCE: Who the f*uk is Caitlyn?

And I'm no shipper, but it kinda beggars belief that after all the Fry/Leela fuss in BBS, that he would suddenly forget her and shack up with Random Earth Female #331.

[Archonix]

Colleen.

The main problem was the sudden change of gears when Yivo started with all the "oh you were dressed provocatively" crap. That whole segment just felt completely out of place. I'd have dropped that - and the "genticles" with the whole implication of a "rape" thing - and extended the segments on either side of it to give more of a build-up to Bender's rescue, and to give Leela more time to be talked into joining the tentacle thing. Maybe even have Fry talk her into it, after a long attempt to stay free of its control, and then have Bender's rescue actually be somewhat meaningful. Maybe.

Bascally I objected to Yivo as a sympathetic character. A lonely alien could work, but it'd have to be inhuman and incomprehensible and, rather than being in "love" with everyone, merely trying to provide a heavenly paradise for the people it's captured in order to keep them around to sate its need for company.

The idea of Fry dating someone else after BBS could have been made to work as well, if they'd worked in some idea of Fry being confused by the way he's feeling after Lars and so on.

Also what was with Kif? I see the need for him to grow a spine, but I don't believe he'd be so vindictive toward Amy. SShe's been failthful to him for years, a single slip when he's dead... I just don't see it.

Ultimately the problem is that it felt rushed and jumpy. I think it's the problem of having to slice up for episodes again, it forces an awkward stop-go pacing that prevents the story from developing coherently.

cross-posting is fun!

[A Spy in Mancunia]

Let me start with a digression. A long, long time ago, Venture Brothers episode "Love Bheits" aired. The core of the episode was that a sadistic cyborg megalomaniac falls in love with an underage boy in a Princess Leia outfit. At the time, I called it "the vilest love story in all of fiction".

"Love Bheits" may now step down!

I'll put more detailed remarks within spoilers below, but suffice it to say, I was a lot less disappointed than a lot of people in this thread. Don't get me wrong: this film has serious failings, which I will address. But by and large, I was just so delighted that it was neither the meh-fest of "Bender's Big Score", nor, as some sneak peek reviews had made me fear, Family Guy In Space.* It just had the sense of wonder that "Bender's Big Score" mostly lacked, and generally felt a lot more like Futurama.

As for the downsides, I agree with most other reviewers here. See below. There are spoilers there.

*Isn't that their newest film, anyway?

Spoiler (hover to show)

OK, more detailed comments as promised.

I'd heard some bad things about this film, and at the start, I was bracing myself for a bad fanfic experience. However, somewhere between the wedding and the Deathball tournament, it clicked for me, and I got back to the old Futurama feel.

So yes, it's a love story, and it warms my cold anti-shippy heart that only about 0.1% of it is Fry/Leela. Nice to see a new spin on romance, which so far on the show has been pretty much the regular late 20th century kind.

The Big Thing With Tentacles plot was exciting, sciencefictional, and held up well until the squished let-down of an ending, which I will return to. It also made for some awesome visuals, and some moments which were creepier than anything I can remember from the show. Which is a good thing, in my mind. I *liked* psycho Fry in the church. What I don't like is the way it didn't gel with his personality before or after said scene. To which I will return.

Bender's subplot felt off-pace (yeah yeah, episodes spliced together, I know), but was fairly hilarious.

Leela. After her being rather minor and occasionally OOC in "Bender's Big Score", this film more than made up for her by showing her at her best: scrapping, brave and smart. This was essentially her story, at least after Fry went through the rip in the universe. (If only her character hadn't broken in the last five minutes...) I'm also eternally grateful that the writers didn't go the clichéd route and make her jealous of Colleen.

Most others were in character as well (I address the ones who weren't below). Bender was at his human-hating best. Amy sleeping with Zapp was scary, but the kind of thing she would do. And Zapp was excellently horrid, with many classically sleazy lines.

Big parts for two of my favourite minor characters: Wernstrom and Hedonism-bot. And a not-so-big, but still funny, for another: Beelzebot. And they brought back the 1-X robot! Rock.

Good visuals. Did I mention the good visuals?

It was *funny*. I still don't think it had as many brilliant jokes as the better episodes, but the comedy felt a lot less crude than in "Bender's Big Score".

OK, the failings. It's a lot more fun to point out bad bits, don't you think? I'll start with the least serious ones and work my way up.

This film had the same problem as "Bender's Big Score", in that it relied on the audience to have seen all episodes and recognise obscure characters. It probably wasn't as bad as "Bender's Big Score" in that regard, but Pazuzu saving the Professor and Wernstrom felt... well. If you hadn't seen that episode, that would have come off as a great big Pazuzu ex machina. (At least I got to type "Pazuzu ex machina".)

Gross-out jokes still don't charm me, but they were thickest at the start and then thinned out. And I did find a few of them funny, such as the non-compulsory snake-eating and Zapp eating Kif on a peanut butter sandwich. The coffee enema machine was in character with the Professor's usual obsession, like the suppositories in "The Deep South".

Speaking of gross-out: too many Amphibiosans with inflatable heads. And since when can Kif stretch more than a thousand times his normal height? Helen Parr couldn't stretch half that far.

I agree with Graham about Kif being unfair to Amy at the end. I mean, it's obvious (I hope) that the writers are setting up for the plot of the next film, but it hardly counts as cheating when your partner's DEAD.

Characterisation. This demands a whole sub-category.

Of the two new characters, both had a lot of potential, and neither fulfilled it. I realise Colleen was meant to be a minor character and very shallow, but if Fry is supposed to love her that much, and feel so heartbroken after he dumps her, couldn't they give her some positive traits (other than beauty) to show why he fell for her in the first place? I guess the thing was that she was pretty much a female Fry, but I never saw anything more than a superficial attraction to her. (Nor did I see why he fell for Yivo, which made Fry's sadness at the end come completely out of the blue.) When she was first introduced, I assumed Fry was showing her off to make Leela jealous and get back at her after the whole Lars thing, but that didn't seem to be the case.

Yivo was... worse. Yes, having the big huge tentacle monster turn out to be sympathetic is the kind of funny twist that Futurama would pull, but Yivo *wasn't* sympathetic. Or anything. I got the feeling the writers were working Round Robin-style and hadn't come to any agreement as to whether Yivo was meant to be sleazy, or nice, or inscrutable, or what.

The rape joke could have been worse, but threw me completely out of the film. After that, I just kept seeing Yivo as Alcazar. In fact worse, because at least Alcazar's sexual relationship with Leela was consensual. So, Yivo was going to rape everyone in the universe, and then shklee... raped everyone in the universe. There's no nice way to put it. But at least shklee bought a nice ring.

In short, I'll remember both Colleen and Yivo more for their nice designs than for any interesting characterisation. And I was even a bit disappointed with Yivo's design... shklee had too human-like features (apart from the one eye) than you'd expect from an extra-dimensional tentacle planet.

Tentacled!Fry was out of character. Damn was he out of character. In fact, much like Yivo, he wobbled all over the place. He *wasn't* supposed to be just a mouthpiece for Yivo, he was just supposed to be under shkler influence. So why did he go from normal Fry, to spaced-out cult leader, to sadistic psycho? I've never met anyone with the tentacle of an all-powerful extra-dimensional being attached to their spine, but I assume their behaviour is at least consistent.

Leela's change of heart at the end. I don't know what to say. Aside from being even more summary and uncalled-for than Anakin's fall at the end of "Revenge of the Sith" (never thought I'd say that about anything), the real kick was that it was *unnecessary*. The plot wouldn't change one jot if Leela was still rebelling against Yivo when the robots saved them all at the end. Why they did it, I'll never know.

Oh yes, the end. It was squished, for reasons already elucidated by other posters like Graham. I liked the visuals of the pirate ship, and loved the reason that Bender's sword could injure Yivo, but are you kidding me? The ending felt like one minute long. I wasn't too fond of the "Pirates of the Caribbean II" parody, either. Firstly, I can't see why anyone would parody such a lame film, particularly a couple of years after it came out. That's the kind of crap we hate modern Simpsons for. Secondly, a parody should do something witty with the source material. This was more of a copy: instead of Jack Sparrow fighting a big octopus monster, we have Bender fighting a big octopus monster. Big whoop.

Other things I noticed:

Is it just me, or did the arcade games look really, really old? I know the animators must be tired of coming up with new "this is THE FUTURE!" visual jokes, but they looked like they were from the 1990s. Apart from the French-kissing, which I assume was added to placate the fangirls.

Why are there so many damned robots? I mean, just about when I got used to the idea of a Robot Hell, we find out that there are millions of robots in it... I guess no robots go to Heaven. But Heaven is Yivo! Ahh, confusing.

I can't help but notice that they built a dome around the Earth. A reference to another overhyped film based on a cartoon series? Probably not, but it would be fun if it were.

Normally this is where I would have a summary. If you want one, read the review again. Better than "Bender's Big Score", felt like Futurama, good but not great. Would have been great with more consistent characterisation and less of a rushed ending.

[Lisabella]

@ Chris RE: the feel of the movie:

Spoiler (hover to show)

I have to agree that it actually felt more like a Futurama episode this time out.  BBS felt more like a dramatic serial than a Frama episode to me.

I think I liked the Colleen/Fry plot more because it finally put Leela in a position where she got to express jealousy.  None of Fry's other relationships bothered her at all, but she clearly develops a tad of resentment for Colleen by the midpoint of their interaction.

[Archonix]

I was watching the special features yesterday, all those deleted scenes. There's a very small scene they removed which, now I've seen it, would have somehow made everything work so much better.

Spoiler (hover to show)

Leela and Amy are talking to Fry about his break-up with Colleen. Amy tries to encourage Fry with the thought that there are other women out there but Fry just storms off saying "I'll never love again!". It explains so much. The way he was feeling then explains why he left, why he was so vindictive toward Colleen and maybe even why he latched onto Yivo so powerfully when he experienced what he thought was real love. And they cut it. No wonder it felt so lumpy. It was only a 30 second scene as well, it wouldn't have significantly cut the run-time. They could have got rid of the bit with Fishy Joe instead.