BEFORE: A continuation of the OTHER Matt Groening-created Fox animated sitcom, which was cancelled after 4 seasons. Storylines for the planned 5th season were turned into 4 feature-length DVDs, which I got from Amazon + eBay, so I'll try to whip through them this week.
THE PLOT: Planet Express sees a hostile takeover and Bender falls into the hands of criminals where he is used to fulfill their schemes.
AFTER: I admit I was a little unsure about whether to count this as a "movie" and include it as part of my project - but then I found out that the whole plot centers around time travel. So it's about one of my favorite topics, and is a good follow-up to last night's film.
I did manage to see every episode of the Fox show, I think - except for the ones that got pre-empted by NFL games that ran overtime. Fox scheduled the show for 7 pm on the East Coast, and if a football game ran over (including the very unnecessary post-game recap) then the episode of "Futurama" didn't air, and they went straight into the 8 pm episode of "The Simpsons". Why Matt Groening never sued Fox-TV for not airing one of his shows, I have no idea.
This movie starts with a blatant dig at Fox, though - the Planet Express missions get cancelled by their corporate bosses at the "Box Network", and then they get taken over by some nudist aliens, who want to use Bender the robot to travel through time and steal Earth's treasures from the past - the Mona Lisa, various statues, etc. Though the time-travel is one-way, Bender can shut himself down and exist in the caves under the building, holding the treasure until the appropriate moment he was sent back in time...
What the staff discovers is that traveling into the past is very dangerous - you can easily change the past by convincing yourself to do something differently, which creates a duplicate version of yourself. (the one that travels back to the future, and the one that doesn't, for example) This ties in neatly with conversations I've been having with my co-worker about the book "The Time-Traveler's Wife" - she didn't understand how Henry could interact with an older version of himself, without "replacing" himself in that time period.
This movie puts forth the theory of causality, in which creating a time-altered duplicate of oneself adds a "doom coefficient" into the equation - namely that the time paradox will take care of itself, by killing off the duplicate in a horrible (and comic) fashion. If the paradox is not resolved, well, then the whole universe is in danger.
So the duplicate is doomed (but aren't we all?) - I can't say that they got the time-traveling scenes perfect (what movie does?) but as complicated as it was, at least it was quite entertaining, when it wasn't confusing.
We also see a time paradox similar to the one where the inventor of the time machine travels back in time and gives his younger self the plans to build a time machine - so who really invented the thing? In this case, who created the time-travel code? At the end of the film it's planted back into the beginning scenes, so where did it originate?
The drawback of "Futurama" is that all future-set films are essentially a by-product of the times in which they are created - and this show was first aired in 1999. At the time cryogenic freezing seemed like the wave of the future, so the creators built jokes around preserved heads in floating jars. Dr. Kevorkian was in the news, so they turned phone booths into "suicide booths". Celebrities like Al Gore also played big roles - hey, they rolled with what they had to work with. But then they got locked into a particular version of the future, which even in 2007 had to stay faithful to the 1999 predictions.
With voice cameos by Coolio, Mark Hamill, Sarah Silverman
RATING: 7 out of 10 spam e-mails
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