| | |  | Anime & Animation | Home » » Futurama: Bender's Game [Blu-ray] | | | | | | | Description: | | With fuel prices skyrocketing, the Planet Express crew sets off on a dangerous mission: to infiltrate the world's only dark-matter mine, source of all spaceship fuel. But deep beneath the surface lies a far stranger place... a medieval land of dragons and sorcery and intoxicated knights who look suspiciously like Bender. So park your hover-car and saddle up your unicorn for Futurama's grandest adventure yet: BENDER'S GAME! | | | Product Details: | | | Actors:
| David X. Cohen, Eric Kaplan, Michael Rowe, John Di Maggio, Al Gore | | Director:
| Dwayne Carey-Hill | | Format:
| Anamorphic, Color, DTS Surround Sound, Subtitled, Widescreen | | Language:
| English | | Subtitle:
| Cantonese, Chinese, English, French, Korean, Spanish | | Number of Discs:
| 1 | | Studio:
| 20th Century Fox | | Run Time:
| 87 minutes | | Blu-ray Release Date:
| November 04, 2008 | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 111 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 111 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 34 found the following review helpful:
 Incentivise that employee for a great movie.Nov 04, 2008
By Aberwak
This movie is completely independent from the other two films, with everything back to normal at the beginning of it from when the last ended. It's pretty easy to follow along for thsoe who haven't seen the other two, or even the rest of the series. As others have mentioned, this movie takes on a D&D / Lord of the Rings feel to it as it explores the fantasy realm, but it's nicely explained as to why it happens that way. Everything seems to blend together well in this movie (the various subplots set up at the beginning join together). The movie also refers back to the original series and explains various things: a possibile origin between the Farnesworth-Wordstrom rivalry, more on the Mom-Farnesworth relationship, Nibbler being picked up off Vergon 6 as it implodes (and why it does implode), and a few other things. I think all of these add to what's known in the Futurama universe without taking away from anything, and fits very well in to what is already established.
I really enjoyed the movie, probably more than the other two movies. The one thing I didn't like so much about the DVD were the features. I didn't find them all that exciting. I enjoyed seeing how to draw the characters, and the genetics lab was somewhat interesting (but limiting). Everything else wasn't bad, but just seemed a bit short.
Features:
-Movie Commentary
-Storyboard Animatic for part one (~ 20 minutes)
-Futurama Genetics lab (you can choose two characters and see what they look like merged- but only for a small number of characters)
-Dungeons & Dragons & Futurama (~ 7 minutes, explains D&D references in the show)
-How to draw Fry, Bender/Flexo, Leela, & Zoidberg (~ 8 minutes)
-3-D modeling of various ships in the series (~ 5 minutes)
-Deleted scene (only one)
-"Blooperama," outtakes from the movie (~ 2 minutes)
-Bender's Anti-Piracy Warning
-Trailer for the fourth movie: "Into the Wild Green Yonder"
The packaging I got my DVD in was the cardboard "carbon neutral" packaging, in which the disc is put into a cardboard slit. I went out and bought a CD envelope to put in my box instead of using the slit.
The box did contain 4 Futurama postcards: giant Bender and Zoidberg (from the Anthology of Interest), Fry and Leela running away from aliens attacking, an ad to "Keep your robot clean" and a generic "The future is today, worry about it tomorrow." Even though these were mostly put in to advertise that these images were for sale in paintings, I kind of like the extra of having postcard-sized art ("One 'art' please").
39 of 47 found the following review helpful:
The unmistakable stench of dwarf urine!Nov 05, 2008
By Senor Zoidbergo
The first two Futurama movies were ok (well, to be honest, Beast with a Billion Backs was terrible), but this third installment is a winner. It has all the sly humor from the classic Futurama seasons that you've missed, and then some. I enjoyed the greater inclusion of Dr. Zoidberg.
The premise is quite true to life; the Planet Express crew must deal with the increase in dark matter fuel prices. This somehow segues into a Lord of the Rings plot which I won't spoil, but it actually works out quite well. We have an interesting tie-in between Mom and Professor Farnsworth.
All the old favorite characters are here too, including Morbo the Annihilator, Nibbler, Sal, Scruffy the Janitor, and George Takei. I didn't see Zapp Brannigan or Kif, but they weren't missed, and would've detracted from the story, or rather, the semblance of a story.
In conclusion, I think it's the unmistakable stench of dwarf urine that makes this Futurama movie a winner!
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 What do barbarians, great axes, and Bender's Game have in common?Dec 15, 2008
By Michael J. Tresca
"Talien"
I'm the target audience for Bender's Game. A lifelong gamer of over two decades (yeeck, I'm getting old), I also know and love the book by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game. With the title alone, the Futurama writing staff is clearly letting me know this is the movie for me.
Bender's Game starts promising, with jokes about the rising cost of fuel prices. There's also a sly joke about Leela's anger issues, which are controlled by a shock collar. A shock collar Leela starts to find ... titillating. Just when things get interesting and this plot point could turn into something awkward and funny, it's dropped.
Bender discovers that he has no imagination and, aggravated that he can't participate in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, flips out Mazes & Monsters-style, renaming himself Titanius and wandering the sewers. He then gets sent to the HAL institute, Arkham Asylum for robots. This plot point is pursued to a point and then dropped.
Meanwhile, Mom (that's her name) has been controlling dark matter prices for years, but there is a means of invalidating her stranglehold on fuel prices. Professor Farnsworth accidentally invented "anti-backwards matter" which, should it ever encounter dark matter, would render dark matter useless. It just so happens that this anti-backwards matter is a 12-sided die. Hilarious, right?
As our lovable misfits build towards a confrontation with Mom and her Killbot goons, reality shifts and suddenly everyone's in a parallel fantasy dimension. And then we get, in descending order of comedic value: D&D jokes, Greek myth jokes, Lord of the Rings jokes, Star Wars jokes, Call of Cthulhu jokes, and did I mention the Lord of the Rings jokes?
There's actually more interesting material on the extras, covering all the allusions to D&D that have appeared in Futurama and confirming that the guys who write the show are hopeless geeks themselves. Unfortunately, they're not really boosting their own geek cred with this movie.
Look, I love Futurama and I love D&D. But this movie is all over the place, using tired, easy jokes for fantasy. I always identified Futurama as a series of in-jokes for sci-fi and tech geeks, which is a much broader category than fantasy gamers. The bizarre diversion into the fantasy realm isn't well thought out, isn't particularly funny, and not all that interesting.
Sorry guys. This is one D&D adventure that doesn't give out nearly as much XP as it should.
5 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Not all movies need to be an hour and a half...Jan 20, 2009
By Ana Mardoll
Futurama Bender's Game / B001DZOC78
*Spoilers*
Oh, man, what happened here? I'm a huge Futurama fan, but it was a struggle to finish this latest installment. Someone needs to tell the Futurama folks that just because something is a movie, that doesn't mean it absolutely must be ninety minutes long.
It feels like there were a couple of decent ideas here, one involving Dark Matter and a Mom Monopoly (two standard favorite Futurama topics) and a second one involving a D&D style storyline. It's somewhat telling that the D&D aspect of the movie, which was featured so heavily in the previews because - let's face it - D&D is awesome, only occurs in the last half of the film and feels like a forced overlay of "D&D plus whatever else the movie was about" rather than a natural progression of the plot.
I think that bears repeating: If you are hyped about this movie for the D&D aspects, be aware that they don't occur until the last half of the movie, at which point you will be drowsy from boredom, and even then the D&D aspects fail to inject the excitement necessary to save this movie from itself. So if you really want to see Futurama D&D, skip directly to the relevant chapter and save yourself a headache.
I love Futurama, but I'm wondering if we've jumped the shark at this point. Maybe I've just watched too much, but the plot twists were too predictable, and the "twist" at the end was obvious from the first twenty minutes of the movie. There is also WAY too much verbal mugging at the camera, such as when Nibbler wonders why no one is surprised that he can talk, and the characters inform him that he forgot to blank their minds after the last Nibbler episode. This aside takes the casual watcher out of the movie ("What are they talking about?") and makes the non-casual watcher wince at the overly rabid fan-boy aspect of it - we didn't really NEED a wink-and-a-nudge that the writers forgot to do the mind-blank last time, so now we're cleaning up our mistake to satisfy the pedantic viewers.
This version provides a closed caption option for the hard of hearing. I do not own this movie - I rented this through my Blockbuster Online account.
13 of 18 found the following review helpful:
 What Happened!?Nov 17, 2008
By Tomb_Stone
I am A huge Futurama fan. Have every episode and love how smart and well timed the comedy can be. As much as I want to love this installment, I can't. Benders big Game is A Big let down. The comedy is so low-brow and the story and dialog is poorly written in comparison to everything that has been done up till now.
-"Benders big score" felt like Futurama well seasoned.
-"The Beast with a billion Backs" felt like a really long episode.
-"Benders game", has too many holes, not enough why?, The jokes all lean toward potty humor (that's not just because one of the castles is design after a toilet), and some jokes are dragged out till you wanna say, "and we are still talking about this, because.....?"
It feels like the writers have taken lessons from family guy and later bad episodes of the Simpsons. The comedy isn't smart, too much sensless humor, an advertisment for a knife commercial that feels like it lasts for 5 minutes (I laughed in the first 30 seconds then it became annoying), they had rosie the robot from the Jetsons in the robot insane asylum), an apearence form the tele-tubies in a fantasy scene, a side story (in support of a larger concept, leelas rage) shock collar gag on leela that ends up going no where, and on top of that and then some we have a very long build up of wasted story time until we finally get to the meat, in this case, benders fake fantasy world, which has limitless possibility, and wasn't taken advantage of the way many fans would hope.
on a side note: if the time is taken to watch the commentary, (bluray lets your see them talk) I was in aw that they basically don't pay attention to the story or whats happening on the screen, and spend the time making jokes to entertain themselves, unless there is too much gross on the screen then they all cringe.... I said it before, "what happened!?"
I can't give this movie five stars just because I wanted to love it, and one or two decent laughs doesn't mean five stars either.
-For Futurama fans and non- fans alike the last thought would be, Rent this before you buy it!
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