Rent Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs (2008)

Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs (aka The Futurama Movie 2) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

The Beast with a Billion Backs is a story that feels like it would make a decent Futurama episode at 22 minutes. At 89 minutes, however, the joke wears rather thin. The problem is that while most Futurama stories tend to have a lot of going with further developing twists, this feature film centers mostly on one central event and keeps it going until the allure and absurdity become tiresome.

The script does feel, however, as the most likely candidate for a Futurama theatrical movie, considering how lacking it is on lore and easy enough to digest. It focuses mostly on relationships. Amy and Kif finally decide to tie the knot and get married. Fry starts dating a woman but is conflicted as she wants to have a polyamorous relationship. During all of this, a strange portal opens up in space that leads a monster creature known as Yivo. Yivo attempts to invade the planet by inserting his tentacles into all life on Earth, hoping to reproduce his species.

Just when it seems as though this is your standard alien invasion story, Yivo speaks and makes his intentions clear. He doesn’t so much want to invade Earth as much as he wants to make a commitment to be in a long-term relationship with...well, the entire universe. That’s a decent bit until you start really thinking about what this says about such a relationship where consent is not present.

Eventually, Yivo convinces the whole universe to say in his dimension for a long-term relationship but robots cannot enter his domain. This, of course, breeds anger and jealousy within Bender as the robots of his universe conspire to take down Yivo. By the end of the film, there’s betrayal and strained relationships, along with a cynical message about love not being something that is shared, coming off like a screenplay hammered out by someone who was recently dumped and needed to vent.

The film takes the characters to some rather dark and uncomfortable places. For example, Kif is killed at one point in the story and Amy decides to sleep with Zapp for some reason. When Kif is revived, he is both disgusted and confused. Fry and Leela also have their relationship further strained with Fry feeling all the more confused about finding love when it comes in so many forms. And Bender, well...Bender is just Bender. It doesn’t matter what story is present as his shiny metal ass always seems to bounce back in any scenario.

There was a real chance with such a film to be more poignant with its focus on romance and questioning of relationships on a grander scale. Yet this Futurama script only feels half there, more crowded with its grander scale and less time to make the more personal stories mean something being mere vessels for jokes. As far as the Futurama movies go, this is by far one of the worst.