Our weekly family movie night has provided my wife and me with some great opportunities to introduce The Terror Team to some classic movies. Recently, we picked Back to the Future for the first time, followed rapidly (by unanimous request by the team) for Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III.
I’m not going to get into a massive review of all three movies, but in a similar vein to what Brian Niemeier has been doing with his 80s and 90s movie reviews, there are a few themes in this trilogy that I found really interesting on a fresh rewatching. I hadn’t seen BttF or BttF Part III for probably two decades. Truth be told, I’d never watched all of BttF Part II.
A quick refresher, then, for folks who haven’t seen the movies in a while. In Back to the Future, we meet Marty McFly, a typical ‘80s high school kid who’s more concerned with music and girls than he is with his grades. His only real friends are his girlfriend Jennifer, and quasi-mad scientist Emmitt “Doc” Brown. Marty’s dad is a pushover and his mother has kind of given up on life.
Doc Brown invents an actual, working time machine, and Marty gets sent back thirty years into the past to 1955. There, he accidently alters the first meeting of his mother and father, and has to get them back together before 1955’s Doc Brown sends him back to his own time. At the end of the movie, Marty successfully gets his parents together, goes back to 1985, finds out that his interference actually made his parents’ lives much better, and all seems well. At least until Doc arrives once again from thirty years in the future (2015) to grab Marty and Jennifer because something’s gone horribly wrong with their kids.
This is where Back to the Future Part II picks up. In 2015, Marty picks up a Sports Almanac containing all the sports scores from 1955-2000, and plans to take it back with him to 1985 and get rich. Unfortunately, Biff Tannen, his father’s old bully gets ahold of both the almanac and the time machine, and goes back to 1955 to give it to his teenage self. When Marty, Doc, and Jennifer return to 1985, they find themselves in a horrible, dystopian timeline where Biff runs what’s left of Hillsdale. Marty and Doc have to go back to 1955 again and prevent teenage Biff from keeping the almanac, all while also avoiding their 1955 selves from the previous movie. At the end of this movie, Marty successfully destroys the almanac, but Doc and the time machine are struck by lightning and sent back to 1885, stranding Marty in 1955 again.
Queue Back to the Future Part III, where Marty decides to defy 1885 Doc’s express instructions to return himself to 1985, and instead chooses to go back to 1885, rescue Doc and return them both to their own time. Things, of course, don’t entirely go as planned, but Marty is more or less successful, returning to his own time with only one slight apparent alteration to the timeline. Mercifully, no one has seen fit yet to try and either remake this trilogy, or add a fourth entry Crystal Skull style.
The first movie is a fantastic, self-contained story. We’re introduced to all of the important characters, and get a great blend of drama and humor as Marty is a complete fish out of water three decades before his own time. However, we also get some great reflections on the idea that small changes can have big effects down the road. Marty nearly destroys his own future self by doing something selfless – pushing his father out of the way of a car that was going to hit him. His efforts to get his parents together ultimately result in his father standing up to the guy who had bullied him throughout high school, and then having the confidence to go on and become a successful author.
We also get a slight, optimistic look at racism in 1955, when Marty runs into an African-American worker at the soda shop. On hearing his name, he recognizes the future mayor of Hillsdale, and blurts out that he’ll be mayor someday. While the while owner of the shop poo-poos the idea of a “colored” man ever being mayor, we see several times over later that the worker does, in fact, become mayor, and his son goes on to open a successful car modification business in the mid-2010s. I suspect if this movie were to be made now, we’d have to be subjected to a heavy-handed sermon on systemic racism and other woke nonsense. As it stands, the movie’s portrayal of both changing cultural attitudes and optimism that anyone can succeed in America is both far more subtle, and all the more powerful for its subtlety.
Back to the Future, Part II feels like the weakest of the bunch. It’s not a bad movie, but especially in its third and final act, it really requires having watched the first movie to understand what’s going on. It is interesting to see Biff’s character throughout all three timeframes. He never really changes, he only gets worse with power and money. Marty’s character, meanwhile, gets revealed in a new way. In the first movie, we were introduced to his attitude that “Nobody calls me chicken”. It was portrayed as almost a good thing, as Biff gets some much-needed comeuppance out of the fight. In the second movie, we see that Marty’s hot-headedness is actually responsible for both his and Jennifer’s poor financial state, and the troubles that their kids get into. Being perpetually easily goaded into rash decisions isn’t an admirable character trait after all, and it gets both 2015 and 1985 Marty (in 1955) into trouble several times in the second film. This may be the weakest film of the bunch, but it’s essential to understanding Marty’s character, and why his change of heart in Part III has such an impact on his future life.
Finally, a confession. Back to the Future, Part III is my personal favorite film of the bunch. I love Westerns, and this one does an excellent job of playing with a few of the classic tropes of the genre, while also telling a redemption and growth story. Doc Brown is content to live out his life in the Wild West as a blacksmith, until he meets Clara, the new schoolteacher (and saves her from her historic death falling into a ravine). Marty, meanwhile, is goaded into a fight with Biff’s great-grandfather, to be settled with a duel on the day Doc and Marty are supposed to return to 1985.
Here again, we see Marty’s immaturity and rashness nearly cost him everything, again. His great-great grandfather McFly is on hand to point out the cost of his impulsive behavior, and tell him a bit about Marty’s great-great uncle Martin, who was similarly hot-tempered, and died with a knife in his belly after a bar fight because of it.
Ultimately, Marty does make it back to 1985, but something in him has changed. When confronted with an offer to street race some punks from his high school, he instead yanks his truck into a J-turn and heads in the other direction. This causes him to not broadside a Rolls-Royce which abruptly pulls out into what would have been his path had he raced the other teens. When this happens, the sheet of paper that Jennifer had brought back from 2015 fades away. As Doc says “Your future is what you make it. It hasn’t been written yet!”
Probably everyone who has gotten through puberty has at least one thing in their lives that they wish they could go back and change. That’s part of the big appeal of time travel stories – the idea of going back and righting past wrongs, warning our past selves not to do something, or else skipping ahead a few decades to see if our decisions turn out okay. Back to the Future asks the question “Would we really be different?” Sure, George McFly turns out better because of Marty’s meddling, but Biff is the same, only worse when given money and power. Marty’s change doesn’t come from knowing his own future (he doesn’t see his future self at all, only a very brief encounter with his own son) but instead comes from seeing the consequences of his own actions come home to roost in the most lethal of ways in the Old West. And Doc? Interestingly enough, it’s “The Power of Love” which has the most effect on Doctor Emmitt Brown.