When I first heard that Futurama was coming back in not only one, but four feature length films, I had a bit of a mixed reaction. On the one hand, I was excited that Futurama was returning like I'm sure all Futurama fans were, but I couldn't help some alarming bells from ringing in my head. Was this movie going to attempt to "reboot" the Futurama series, like so many series of the past. Was it going to be in a completely different style to the series? Were any of the original voice actors going to return? And basically, would the spark of Futurama still be there after roughly five years?

After hearing rave reviews from my friend (and having the money) I decided to pick up a copy of Bender's Big Score and watch it. Thankfully, the show looked the same and the original voice actors returned to voice the cast, but the question still needed to be answered: was this movie going to have the same spark as the series?

Well...after watching about five minutes of the movie, particularly the movie making fun of the fact the series was cancelled (parodied by the planet express crew having been fired two years prior) and the Fox (Box) Network, I uttered three simple words: Futurama is back!

I had only planned to watch the first five minutes to see if it was any good, but I ended up watching the whole thing from start to finish: I was hooked. The plot was brilliant. Yes, it didn't make a lot of sense, but after about ten minutes you just kind of learned to go along with the constant time travel. You couldn't tell what was going on (a character would be killed, but it would turn out to be time duplicate) but in this case it turned out to be a plus. At any moment, someone could go back in time and change what was going on. You couldn't trust what you were seeing on the screen, but that kept me on the edge of my seat.

Usually in a movie, you have the main plot, and a sub plot. The sub plot usually plays a minor role and sometimes never interacts at all with the main plot. Well, this movie had two sub plots, and they both tied in quite seamlessly to the main plot. But I think the thing that impressed me most was the monstrous amount of cameos: Barbados Slim, Santa, Harlem Globetrotters, Robot Devil(unfortunately he didn't have a speaking role), Yancy, Seymour... I could go on...

I was going to complain about the ending, but after looking at some information for the next movie (The Beast with a Billion Backs) it looks like it is not just going to be one of those "the ending will be completely forgotten about in the next movie". According to wikipedia, the next movie will follow directly from the events in this one.

So all in all I was plesently suprised by this movie and highly recommend it to any Futurama fans.

All Glory to the Hypnotoad...