Monday, August 25, 2008

Back to the Future (1985)



If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. Is that how Robert Zemeckis made the greatest movie of all-time? I suppose the fact that I just asked that means I'm not a serious film buff. But if serious film buffs are not allowed to say that Back to the Future is a true masterpiece while keeping a straight face, then that's the last group I need to be a member of. Time travel will never have such style ever again. And there is hardly an unnecessary frame or a line that is not perfectly written and delivered (OK, maybe there was no good reason for the bad guys to be Libyans, but we'll let that slide). Everything is thought-out so carefully. In the movie Einstein the dog is the world's first time traveler. As a kid watching it I found that amusing, but you realize what a nice touch it is once you learn a little bit more about Einstein the theoretical physicist. Wait, what do you mean, you've seen this? It's brand new.
IMDB

3 comments:

Mearns said...

Good review.
I agree, this is an overlooked masterpiece.
When I was in LA, I went to the gym where this scene was filmed and recited the "If you guys ever have kids" dialogue in this very stairwell.
Did you notice that when Marty goes back to the future, that Twin Pines Mall has a different name?

scituate said...

That's awesome. Yeah, it's all the little things like The Lone Pine Mall that I'm talking about when I say everything was so well thought-out. Who the hell is John F. Kennedy?

Dr-RJP said...

Back To The Future is a true masterpiece of film making that should be required viewing in any curriculum on cinematography and script writing. Every scene is perfectly shot and sets up the scenes that follow it. Unlike many movies that present a complicated context for the story, the secret of Back To The Future is in its storytelling. The prologue sets the foundation for the entire film and we get to know the main characters with a minimal of exposition. This is a film you can watch dozens of times and never feel like it's gotten old or dated even though you know what happens in each frame.

All time travel movies explore the paradox of changing an element or event in one's past and witness the catastrophic butterfly effect it has on the future. In Marty's case, he interrupts a critical event in his parents' past: the day they first met. On his trip from 1985 to 1955, Marty accidentally changes places with his father and becomes the object of his mother's affection instead. Unless he figures out how to undue this accidental act of Cupid and get his future parents to meet and fall in love, he will be stuck in 1955 forever.

What I loved about this film besides the plot and the story line was how it explored our psychological development as reflected by the way our parents interacted with us as children and teenagers. If Marty had ever wondered why he feared rejection as much as he did, he got to see the source of it, first-hand, while watching his father exhibit the same fear of failure that he himself exhibits. While his mother may seem to be his opposite, the fact that she kept secrets of her teenage years from him is also repeated when he fails to tell his mother the real reason he needs the family car for the weekend, namely a romantic evening rendezvous at the lake with his girlfriend, Jennifer.

Another major aspect of this movie that sets itself apart from the usual time travel genre, is that the protagonist is not the person who invented the time machine (like H.G. Wells) to specifically go back into the past to change the present, or to escape the present by traveling forward into the future. Instead, our time traveler is accidentally sent into the past in an effort to escape a present danger and faces a new danger of remaining in the past.

Of course, the kicker in this movie is that Marty does not leave the past the way it originally transpired but changed the psychological makeup of his father 180 degrees from being the nerd who got bullied in school to being the one Most Likely to Succeed in his future beyond high school. There was also a moral to this story which fits not only with his father's future but also with the future of Doc Brown who got to see what his future portends in his invention of a time machine. The idea that you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it.

Like Star Wars, Back to the Future was also a movie made for sequels if only because the viewers did not want the original movie to end. To that end, they were rewarded with a message that read, To be continued... after establishing the premise for the next installment where Marty and his girlfriend and future wife, Jennifer, have to travel into the future to deal with a problem involving their children.

Eventually, Back to the Future becomes a trilogy with its 3rd installment going to a place in time not visited by the previous two. Although the sequels were not as well-made as the original (which is par for the course), the 3rd film was needed to get this mini-franchise back to where it began as a lighthearted romp through time. The 2nd film left a bitter taste in the mouths of moviegoers by making it about the dark side of changing one's past for selfish reasons given information about the future that would have negative repercussions for everyone else around you.

Nevertheless, the 3rd film also picked up where the 2nd one ended and has enough good moments in it to make you forget about that trip to a parallel Hill Valley.