Mario’s Musings (Anniversary Edition): Back to the Future
“If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit.”
Writer’s Note: I had this written on the day of the movie’s 35th anniversary, but planning for my sister’s surprise engagement got a bit in the way so I delayed this. My apologies.
Back to the Future is 35 years old, making your resident reviewer resort to new ways to seem younger than a majority of his favorite films. We all know Back to the Future and everything that comes with it; Marty, Doc, Biff, George, Lorraine, the DeLorean, Einstein, as well as Huey Lewis and the News. It’s a timeless flick… uh... pun somewhat intended.
The story is something easy to sink your teeth into. Marty McFly’s close friend Doctor Emmett Brown invents a time machine out of a DeLorean, but gets the plutonium to power it by lying to Libyan terrorists by saying he’d build them a bomb instead. You know, totally normal stuff for a scientist to do. Doc gets shot to death by the Libyans and Marty flees the scene in the DeLorean, accidentally turning on the flux capacitor and sending himself back in time to November 5, 1955, the day Doc Brown conceived the idea of the flux capacitor and the same day Marty’s parents met. Without the plutonium to power the machine, Marty is stuck in the past and has to find a way to get… well, you know.
Quite possibly my favorite shot in the entire movie.
Time travel stories are a dime a dozen, but only a select few become timeless. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court dealt with a man who gets knocked out and wakes up in the land of King Arthur, Planet of the Apes has an astronaut who accidentally travels to the future to find the Earth ruled by apes. Back to the Future is so much more though, as not only does Marty have to get back to the future based on sheer luck thanks to having the flyer that lets him and Doc know when a lightening bolt will strike to power up the DeLorean’s flux capacitor, he has to get his parents together after he accidentally ruins how they meet and fell in love. Otherwise, Marty will be wiped out from existence. There’s so much happening, yet it’s so simple to follow. Nothing gets overshadowed and nothing overstays it’s welcome. And the feel good ending of what awaits Marty in the future after he gets his parents together is almost too good to be true.
Hindsight being what it is, we never really got into what an interesting character Marty McFly really was. He appears to be a semi-popular teenager; he plays guitar, he has a girlfriend, and he has a car. And yet, his friendship with Doc Brown remains to me the most interesting aspect of his character. I always felt that a nerdy kid would be hanging with Doc Brown, and not someone who seemed popular like Marty. And a lot of it ties into his home life, as at the beginning of the movie, he might have seen Doc Brown as a father figure because his own father was such a subservient lackey to Biff.
I love Back to the Future, but to be honest, I was extremely late to the party seeing it. I didn’t see it all the way through until senior year of high school, despite owning a VHS copy for years beforehand. Until then, my time travel movies were the Terminator flicks and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But when I finally watched it, I was hooked and immediately followed it up with the sequels once I got my hands on the DVDs. Don’t be late to the party. Watch this movie.