Futurama Reaction Paper

Futurama’s story revolves around a delivery boy in New York named Philip Fry who accidentally slipped into a cryogenic pod that froze him for a thousand years – from the year 1999 to 2999. During that span of 1000 years, many invasions by extra-terrestrial beings equipped with high level of machinery caused changes and upsurge of different civilizations in New York. Fry wakes up on the year 2999, where New York was already a distant place from what he knows as it is. Considering that all he wanted was a new life, Fry thinks that all of what happened was a start of something new in his life – new opportunities, new job, and new life.

After his reawakening, Philip finds himself employed as a delivery boy again. And with the new civilization and technology in the year he is at, a chip is inoculated to everyone to attach their occupation with their identity. I think Futurama shows a future that portrays a world where there is orderliness and advancement in the field of technology. It shows a world where people are obliged to follow the rules and they have no control over their situation. It depicts a world where life is no longer valued, thus neglecting the natural phenomenon of the occurrence of people and all living matter. We may say that this new civilization is a beauty, a more forward and a more competitive one, but on its contrary, machines completely dominate the people, and dissatisfaction follows. What happens in the near distant future as shown in Futurama can be quietly observed nowadays. Let’s just say, we don’t want to do this, but we are highly compelled because of survival, because of money, of love, of family and because of selfishness. We usually end up following what are on the trend list because of jealousy and selfishness. Philip, Leela and Bender on the other hand chose to take that unwarranted route.

Futurama is a science fiction film, but if we dig deeper to its meanings and context clues, we can say that it clearly depicts that for science to grow fast and approach a different scheme of understanding, learning and living, it must consider the capability and capacity of people to cope up with it.