Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs (2008)

The second of four direct-to-video features stitched together from Futurama's revived fifth season, The Beast with a Billion Backs arrives with the weary confidence of a property that knows its audience and has no intention of challenging them. Reality has a tear in it. Fry falls for a woman with several other boyfriends, then for a planet-sized tentacled deity named Yivo. The universe marries it. The universe breaks up with it. The film's cultural program, such as it is, sits inert beneath the gags.

The markers of contemporary social consciousness are present as raw material for comedy, not as argument. Yivo is genderless and weds all sentient life, and Colleen keeps a stable of suitors, but both are absurdist premises, not advocacy. Amy and Kif marry and then fracture over her affair with Zapp, which the script treats as a punchline about grief and opportunism. Hermes and Amy remain ordinary crew members, Jamaican and Chinese by design and by nothing else. The mockery of organized religion around Yivo's tentacle cult carries a faint anti-institutional bite, though it aims at credulity, not capital. There is no environmental sermon, no body-positive thread, no neurodivergent reading to extract, and no history to revise. The film is set in the 31st century and has enough trouble with the present one.

Sermonizing stays minimal because the script prefers innuendo to instruction. Bender's closing definition of love, a jealous, hard-to-obtain emotion that does not share itself with the world, is the nearest the film comes to a thesis, and he delivers it while choking two friends in a hug. This is competent, affectionate, deeply unserious entertainment. We classify it, we file it, we move on.