The Back to the Future Trilogy

Knowing that we’d have a lot of free time on our hands while we get settled back in West Malaysia, we’d arranged a couple of hard disks worth of stuff to watch. For the curious, this includes all three seasons of the highly acclaimed Deadwood series and the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show that I’d missed out on watching as I was studying in France when it originally aired. Among the films we have are all three installments of the Back to the Future trilogy, a selection that was prompted by an off-hand comment from Deimos Tel`Arin of Flash Games Download. It took me a while to remember that I’ve never actually gotten around to watching the third film of the series.

Part I

Like every guy who grew up in the 1980s, the original Back to the Future film has a special place in my heart as part of a pantheon that also includes other cult classics like The Goonies, Stand by Me and Some Kind of Wonderful. Even watching it today, the scenes are so familiar that I can almost recite the dialogue word for word. I can still perfectly recall the frisson of excitement at the first sight of the DeLorean time machine, the envy-inducing stylish ease with which Michael J. Fox handles his skateboard, the madcap craziness of pretending to be a space alien to scare someone from the 1950s, the infectious power of the Johnny B. Goode performance and so on. There is zero doubt that the original film still holds up and deserves every single one of the many accolades it has received.

With an additional quarter-century of movie watching experience under my belt, I can point to plenty of flaws I’ve never noticed before of course, such as how unrealistically stilted and on-the-nose most of the dialogue is, how the so-called Libyan terrorists look nothing like Arabs and how ridiculously incompetent they are, how unconvincing the old age make-up looks and how much of the acting is over-exaggerated and almost amateurish by modern standards. But I also noticed plenty of new things that I never appreciated before. For example, I noticed that it is essentially a buddy film, a genre I didn’t use to think Back to the Future belonged in, and a big reason why the movie is so good is because Marty and the Doc clicks so well together.

The slow pace of the how the film opens frankly shocked me as no adventure film released in recent years could possibly afford to devote so much screen time to scenes with no excitement and indeed nothing much of note happening. But here it is useful to establish the setting of 1980s American suburbia and slowly draw us into the life of the teenaged McFly. I noticed that the film-makers spent a significant bit of effort to show us the relationship between Marty and the Doc well before any of the adventurous hijinks started up. I realized that uncharacteristically for a film of this type, the female lead isn’t the hero’s love interest but his mother, which creates a far more interesting dynamic. Indeed, the producers evidently realized that Lea Thompson is such a good actress that she showed up for all three films. Marty’s actual love interest by contrast is such a minor character that they even changed the actress playing her between the first and the second film and probably no one noticed.

Part II

As a kid, I remember looking forward to the second film and being quite thrilled when I finally saw it in the cinema, being particularly awed by the slow reveal of Hill Valley in 2015. However, watching it again last week turned out to be a complete disappointment. While the idea of making a sequel that is tightly intertwined with the original must have seemed quite meta and almost postmodern in its originality at the time, it’s a very tired conceit now. What seemed like a clever tribute to the original in the reenactment of the old scenes in a futuristic setting only feels like a lame attempt to recapture past glories. I was also particularly irked by the awkwardly stupid scenes at the end of the film when Marty tries to recover the sports almanac from Biff. They went on for far too long and the hide-and-seek hijinks were far too silly to be plausible.

I also once thought that the multiple trips through time made for a complex and hence interesting plot, but I now find the multiple layers of reality to be merely distracting. Having the story set in so many time periods, 2015, evil 1985 and back to 1955, also made the producers lazy about convincingly fleshing out each time period. The Biff-influenced version of 1985 is such an obvious parody of the fears of the rising crime wave in the 1980s that it’s hard to believe in it. Similarly, the vision of 2015 went for shock and humor value rather than verisimilitude.

Most of all, Part II lost the measured pace of the original and tried instead to fill every second of screen time with something exciting or amusing. It tried to replace the truly original ideas of the first film with some clever twists on the same concept. The result might have been mildly entertaining back in the late 1980s, but it’s almost painful to watch now.

Part III

I had low expectations for this one going in but it turned out to be a fairly decent action adventure yarn. I suppose that expecting the producers not to pull off the trick of casting the same actors as their ancestors back in 1885 was asking too much but at least the story as a whole wasn’t a total rehash of the previous films and we spent enough time in this period to have a good feel for the setting. It also helped that there was actually a sense of physical danger in this film and switching the romance to the Doc was just inspired. This had the pleasant effect of making the Doc the silly character and Marty the reasonable guy for a change. I loved seeing the Doc work on retro versions of his inventions and was sorry that his Old West sniper rifle never actually saw any use.

Ultimately though the film is still a far cry from the greatness of the original and what emotional affect you get from seeing the DeLorean finally get destroyed is wiped out when we see the Doc’s new and even better time machine. It looks like going for a bittersweet ending is still too harsh for a commercial, family-oriented film and you can’t have anything other than a perfectly happy ending for the masses.

Overall I still enjoyed watching the entire trilogy but I’m glad that they stopped where they did. (There is however an officially licensed adventure game featuring the voices of the original actors that was released at the end of 2010 and purports to continue the story.) It’s clear that only the first film deserves being called a classic and the sequels are only coasting along on its success. I am curious that there are few modern films that are similar to this series. These days, it seems that you can’t attract an audience to an adventure film unless you add a heavy dose of violence into the mix. This gives the series a sense of very pure and innocent fun that you can hardly find in modern cinema any more.

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