Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs

Along with the new Cinematic Titanic, Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and company have released the second of the Futurama movies this week.

Massively disappointing.

I had trouble staying awake.

It's gorgeous, aside from a few weird animation artifacts (out-of-synch dialog, e.g.) and the premise is reasonably amusing: The tear in the universe created in the previous movie Bender's Big Score has allowed a large, tentacly universe-monster to invade us.

The opening is great, too, featuring a "Steamboat Willie"-style rendition of the cast, and there are a lot of amusing ideas. But I didn't laugh. None of us laughed. I got a couple chuckles. And it seemed like it went on and on and on.

Also, one of the characters is killed and we all knew they'd bring him back, which they did in a not particularly interesting way. One of the funniest gags was the recycled Bender "dropping" bricks joke. There was no music, which is okay, but...where were the jokes? I mean, yeah, there's the smelloscope, the Wernstrom rivalry, the squishy Kif, etc., but we've seen these gags many times before, and they only elicit smiles at this point.

Also, while one could argue that the last movie was overly sentimental, this one involved the population of the universe falling in love with a creepy tentacle being (voiced by David Cross), which is sort of alienating. So, no yuks and no emotional attachment = boredom.

Sigh. Ah, well, time to re-watch The Doomsday Machine.