Generic [SPOILER ALERT]
Time Travel as a concept is great for storytelling. Screenwriters must love the chance to weave twisty, crazy stories that double back on each other or create potential paradoxes (Looper being a great recent one). There is a tendency however, to get lost in overexplaining the science behind time travel (then you get a movie like Primer, which, while good, is nearly incomprehensible). However, the truly great time travel stories use the conceit to build around usually a great simple question or concept, at at the top of my personal list, is Back to the Future, which is about as interesting and fun of a time travel movie as you will ever see.
Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is your typical California teenager from Hill Valley. He has a cute girlfriend Jennifer (Claudia Wells) and plays in a band. He also does this to get out of his house, because his parents go through life soullessly; his mom Lorraine (Lea Thompson) chain smokes and is excessively bossy, and his dad George (Crispin Glover) is a spineless pushover who gets used and abused by his boss/bully from high school, Biff Tannen (Thomas Wilson). Marty also has one other hobby to get away….he hangs out with the local “mad” scientist, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). One night, Marty meets with Doc and tells him he’s finally done it: he’s created a time machine out of a DeLorean. Marty obviously doesn’t believe him, but circumstances put Marty into the time machine, where he is transplanted back to the 1950’s, where he needs to meet up with the younger Doc to find his way back home, and along the way, might bump into younger versions of his parents.
The story, as written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, is built around just a terrific “what if” every kid has thought about growing up: What were your parents like when they were your age? Marty’s understanding of his parents completely gets flipped on its ear when he goes back in time. His dad, Marty finds out, loved sci-fi, and had dreams of becoming a sci-fi writer. HIS DEADBEAT DAD!!! This blows Marty’s mind, as does the fact that his dad is also a bit of a creeper with stalker tendencies. More interesting is Marty’s relationship with his younger mother. Marty finds out his mom thinks that HE is very cute, instead of his dad. He learns that she is at least a little sexually curious and bends the rules a few times, which just horrifies Marty. Marty’s understanding of who his parents really are keeps the time travel parts of the story from taking over and keeps Back to the Future from getting swallowed by describing all the time travel mechanisms.
In that description above, isn’t is easy to see how Back to the Future could have been a horror movie? Or a bonkers sci-fi movie? Or a screwball fish out of water comedy? Zemeckis’s script pulls off just an amazing balancing act. The fact that you might screw up your own fate by stopping your parent’s courtship is terrifying, and the underlying threat of Marty not existing sits in the background and keeps the story from going too crazy. In addition, the fate of Marty and his parents contains enough of the horror elements in it, so Zemeckis counterbalances the weird stuff with goofiness. Biff Tannen is one of the great names in movie history: not for one minute are you taking that guy seriously, making him an easy cartoonish foil for Marty in the 50s. With a bad guy like Biff, our focus isn’t on Marty vs. Biff, it’s on Marty trying to learn about/help his parents falling in love. But Zemeckis isn’t done: the jokes about the past are scattered throughout the screenplay, and because they’re not running gags, the jokes hit home more potently, like when Marty, in 1952, points out Doc lives on John F. Kennedy Dr. and Lorraine’s dad says “Who the HELL is John F. Kennedy???” Finally, the scenes that really stir Back to the Future’s drink though are the surprisingly large amount of thrilling action set pieces. The skateboard chase through Hill Valley is well staged and super fun, with one of the great poop joke punchlines in movie history. And when Doc and Marty are trying to send Marty back to the future, the precision of the situation necessary is extremely tense and gives the two leads some nice emotional beats and showcases of real heroism. Back to the Future is like one of those meals at a really nice restaurant, where they combine a series of ingredients you wouldn’t think work together, but because of talent and understanding of who they are serving, the dish comes out spectacular.
The acting in Back to the Future isn’t super great, but it was star making. Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd really became household names thanks to Back to the Future. I’m pretty sure every time people look at Fox, all they see is Marty, with terrific comic timing, and just brilliant reaction shots, like when Lorraine tells Marty to stop “acting like his mother.” Lloyd finds the perfect balancing act of looking crazy, but also being just a nice guy who cares about science. He even gets a great action star moment on top of the clocktower. Lea Thompson doesn’t get mentioned as much as the leads, but her Lorraine makes the story work. She does just enough in the older versions of the character that when we see just how different she is as a younger person, we’re taken aback and made to think about how our parents were before they had us. Crispin Glover shows off a nice mix of strange and sweet as George, making it understandable that Lorraine might fall in love with the guy. And shouts to Thomas Wilson, he probably thanks god everyday for that amazing script, with all the great lines he gets to say playing the cartoonishly dumb Biff.
Science purists clearly laugh at the time travel elements of Back to the Future, but that’s not the goal of the movie. Robert Zemeckis pulls of this terrific balancing act that helps propel him, Michael J. Fox, and Christopher Lloyd into the stratosphere of super duper stars. Think about it, if Back to the Future, flopped, we would never get Zemeckis classics like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, or Cast Away. But if course he was gonna succeed, I mean, look at where he grew up…