Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder

And here we are, folks. We've reached the final installment of the four direct-to-DVD Futurama films. It's been fun, but sadly, all good things must come to an end.

While "Into the Wild Green Yonder" isn't the strongest of the four films, it certainly offers up laughs and plenty of the clever, over the top sci-fi concepts that the series is famous for. Unfortunately, for every joke that hits the nail on the head, another joke comes across as contrived, or simply falls a little flat. Not to despair though, as the jokes that work, work really, really well.

The animation is, as always, top notch. The characters we all know and love are once again brought to life by the wonderful cast, and we get a couple of bonus cameos here thanks to Penn Jillette, Snoop Dogg, and Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane.

As with the other 3 DVD Futurama movies, the story is a tad messy, jumping from plot thread to plot thread, with each episode only vaguely maintaining a semblance of continuity until everything is tied up neatly at the end. That said, the overarching story in this outing is actually very clever, and the ending is spectacular and well designed.

The story ties up some loose ends, but also leaves us on an ambiguous note, perhaps hinting at a future series of DVD movies, or a theatrical film, or, hopefully, an entire new season to grace our TV screens. Fingers crossed that we get more Futurama, as this series is no where near reaching its use-by-date.

Ya ever notice how most people who take the effort to log are the ones who want to criticize or even hate on something?

People who laughed wildly and were genuinely happy with the product seem much less likely to worry about it afterwards.

For the record, my family and I have every Futurama episode and movie on DVD. We like them a lot. We've been looking forward to this movie a long time and in general weren't disappointed (it wasn't the best of the movies but that's just IMHO). These shows have NEVER been about internal consistency, btw.

Bring back the freaking series. If I was Bill Gates I'd just write a check to bring it (and Firefly too, what the hey?) back in a heartbeat. Creating a pleasurable experience for people should count as a humanitarian act.

If you want to hate on something, go watch The English Patient. Your reviews might help spare some innocent people in the future from being subjected to three hours of terminal boredom and depression.

First of all, it's much better than the last one (since i hate all the fantasy crap, not to mention it was badly implemented), but it has issues... The problem is there just isn't enough material here for a full movie. There are a few good laughs, but nothing really worthwhile since everything is too spread out. The whole Leela-Fry love is present again and i really think it's overplayed. In every movie there was some emotional undertones concerning Fry and Leela. That in itself isn't a bad thing, but c'mon, make up your minds already, let them be together or not. The problem is that all these movies are light-years behind the episodes. Maybe it was a blessing that they only made 4 seasons, since almost all the episodes are really good. But now the material is getting old, and drawing it out into hour and a half movies doesn't help... The story is so-so and there are too many characters. It almost feels like they tried to fit everyone in, but most times it has no point. Sure its fun to see the Don-Bot or Lurr, but it has no place in the movie's story line. And the whole Men vs Women theme of the whole movie is funny at first but gets old at the end. Don't even understand what the message is...

It's not bad, but nowhere near great. They should stick to 30 min. long episodes. Those where the ones that made futurama popular.

'Into The Wild Green Yonder' is the 4th movie in the very popular Futurama movie series.Just like the television show and the first 3 movies, 'Into the Wild Green Yonder' is filled with lots of crude and suggestive humor.Most of it is funny, as you'd expect.The movie is also surprisingly sexist.The main targets in the movie are woman.Not just woman, but feminists.If you were a feminist trying to struggle for the right to vote, then you will be shocked and appalled by this movie.Just try not to overreact and form a feminist group in order to cancel the TV show and find every copy of this movie and burn them.As entertaining this movie may be, it does lack the certain spark the first 3 movies had.My favorite movie in the series is 'Bender's Game', and this film isn't near to being as good.Still, I found 'Into the 'Wild Green Yonder' to be a funny and entertaining movie that fans of the show and movies will enjoy.If you don't like the show, then you can bite my shiny metal ass.

The fourth (and, at time of writing, final) Futurama movie is the one that cements the standard for the collection of DVD's by making a majority of the four. Having enjoyed Bender's Game more than the other two films, I was hoping that the third film had been a turn away from the lesser first two. Instead though Wild Green Yonder is more like the first two films in that it is not funny enough to last 90 minutes and suffers from a total overdose of plot.

Now I'm not suggesting that the third film was brilliant, but just that it seemed to keep all the characters in the same plot thread and also helped itself immensely by being consistently funny so I was likely to be thinking about the problems it had (and it did). Wild Green Yonder does not do this. First and foremost is the problem that, while it has good laughs, there is not enough funny material to spread across 90 minutes. With Futurama the plots have always been a bit secondary and the episodes worked off quick-fire comedy and asides. 90 minutes means you have to have a plot and cannot easily rely on quick-fire comedy as easily unless you really get it right (a reason why I worry about the Arrested Development movie). This film doesn't have enough comedy in it to keep the viewer laughing to the point where it is the film's "all".

The writers have tried to do the plot in such a way to create lots of smaller situations though, seemingly in order to allow for lots of gags and jokes. The problem is that, without the laughter to cover this, it leaves the plot fragmented and really messy. As with the other films, the characters are split up across several different threads that kind-of all move in the same direction to the same place but just makes the film feel like a mess with no flow or motion. It is fun to see as many of the characters as we do but by ramming them all into the film it partially causes this – in my opinion Bender's Game is the only one that makes this business work simply because it kept the characters more or less together in the various sections of the film. Here they are fragmented and it doesn't work as well.

The look of the film is as good as the usual Futurama standard and I enjoyed the different things they did with the titles, credits etc. The voice work is also good and, when anyone in the main cast is given a good line or catchphrase they generally nail it with their delivery. The guest voices are more mixed with most good but some dialling it in. Overall Wild Green Yonder is a solid film that, like the others, will mostly please fans without being good enough to win over casual viewers. It is funny but not enough for the running time and the plot threads are messy, distracting and fragmenting. I still quite enjoyed it but it was only "OK" and not good enough to hide the problems even as I was watching it.