Back to the Future

Movies from the 1980s will always occupy a special place in my heart.  As I've relayed here many times, I tend to harbor an intentional blind spot to any shortcomings in them.  When 1985's BACK TO THE FUTURE arrived, I was sixteen, not quite yet going on forty.  In other words, my appreciation for less mainstream cinema was still a year or two away.   Aside from the occasional foreign or indie pic on cable, I was consuming the likes of GHOSTBUSTERS, RAMBO, the INDIANA JONES films, and other pop culture staples for the most part.  With no apology, then or now.   

Had I been ten years older at the time, I might be writing a very different review now, but I don't think so.  Director Robert Zemeckis' rollicking fantasy is so clever and breathless I think I would respond favorably to it at any age.   Bob sure knew how to milk suspense, mostly for comic effect.  Check out his debut, the Beatlemania epic I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND sometime.  In BACK TO THE FUTURE, which has a storyline so well known at this point it seems silly to rehash it, the filmmakers crank the hairpin scrapes off the meter.  To a level of "serious shit", as Doc Brown would say.

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is an amiable high schooler saddled with a hard luck family and rejections for participation in a music contest ("You're just too darn loud," states a guy played Huey Lewis, who with The News provides this film's theme song).  But he's got a sweet girlfriend and a friendship with said Doc (Christopher Lloyd), who you might call a mad scientist.  Brown has been experimenting with a time machine housed in a plutonium powered DeLorean, and invites Marty to see him off as he travels back to 1955, when he first conceived of his invention.   After a few nasty surprises, Marty finds himself piloting the vehicle and lands in a time when a team of gas station employees met you at the pumps and nobody knew who John F. Kennedy was.

Marty will end up meeting his future parents...and inadvertently screwing up their courtship timeline.  He also meets the younger Doc Brown and explains the situation.  Great Scott!  So now not only do Doc and Marty have to figure out how to power the DeLorean to get Marty back to the future, but also how to get the ultra nerdy George McFly (Crispin Glover) to ask Lorraine (Lea Thompson) to the dance so they can eventually get married and Marty can even be born.   There will be a frantic climax.

BACK TO THE FUTURE works in so many ways.  It's cute, ingenious, warm, and even slightly bawdy.  The film pleased the older folks who remembered the '50s and Generation X brats like me who were curious about it.   Rock fans will enjoy several moments.  Sci-fi fans will get their fill, though really thinking through time travel implications leads to some frustrating conundrums.  This has never been an issue for this movie or its two sequels.  Zemeckis and Bob Gale's script really is perfect in its comedic complexity.  

Fox and Lloyd make a great team.  The movie would merely be a clever matinee without their wonderfully human performances.  Everyone is just right, even Glover, whose eccentricities are scaled back appropriately.  As with many of my favorite pop films of my youth, it's difficult to explain why I love it, though I bet it would've been hard to resist even if I were just now seeing it.