Back to the 80s 2: Back to the Future (Dir Robert Zemeckis, 1h 56, 1985)

No film personifies the 1980s like Back to the Future; the film practically dominates any discourse about best 80s science-fiction family movie (in a field that also includes Tron, both Star Wars Sequels, and beloved cult films like Flight of the Navigator and The Last Starfighter), it arguably holds the crown for the decade's best family film (in an even more crowded roster that includes The Never Ending Story, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Dark Crystal (more on that one later), Return to Oz and innumerable Disney, Don Bluth and even early Ghibli films). Heck, this entire season (and our previous visit to the decade), along with countless documentaries, seasons, and 80s nights across the world, have riffed off its title. Back to the Future is the 1980s.

Back to the Future is also a film I've never seen before, so let us redress that balance, and pay homage to one of the cornerstones of 1980s adventure cinema today. For, stripped away from the nearly forty years of hype, sequels and cultural baggage (including theme park attractions, animated series, innumerable homages, parodies, including, most notably, Rick and Morty, and a musical, which seems to be the fate of all 80s cult films these days-see also Beetlejuice and Heathers), Back to the Future is not merely a good movie, but a truly great one.

For those under a rock since the mid 80s, from the top: Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) is the friend of absent-minded yet ambitious professor Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), including house-sitting for the Doc, his lab introduced in a charmingly done one-shot that reveals the Rube Goldberg-ish devices that start his day, tracking along the huge panoply of clocks that dot the Doc's lab, before introducing the figure of Marty, who plugs into the Doc's colossal amplifier with his guitar, turns everything up to maximum, and proceeds to blow himself across the room, arriving out of piles of boxes to realise that Doc and his dog, Einstein, are nowhere to be seen, but soon informed by Doc Brown that he has made a breakthrough and to meet him at the local mall at 1AM the next morning.

What follows is a fleshing out of Marty's personal, school, and home life; his relationship with his girlfriend, Jennifer (Claudia Wells) is disapproved of by his parents, the school's principal declaring that he will never amount to anything and his band panned by the school's talent contest. His home life is no better, his family poor, his brother working at a fast food restaurant, and his father belittled and practically indentured to his former childhood bully, Biff (Thomas F. Wilson), who forces him to write reports for work, uses his car, and generally bullies him into doing his bidding. Needless to say, Marty's life seems to have ended up at a dead-end-this is about to end. For, out of the back of a trailer, dry-ice and all, comes the other undeniable star of Back to the Future:

Enter thus, the DMC-Delorean, beginning its second life, after its completely unsuccessful first as a production car, as a film star. Doc Brown soon lays out his science experiment, together with the plutonium he's stolen from Libyan terrorists, and puts it into action, the DeLorean roaring towards the both of them, before it suddenly disappears-the effect, and the trails of flame that jet across the tarmac still remarkably spectacular, as is, when the car reappears, one explanation by Doc Brown later, in a screech of brakes. In barely five euphoric minutes, through Fox and Lloyd's acting, Alan Silvestri's score, and the special effects work that's made this all possible, Back to the Future has arrived at its masterstroke. Doc, simply put, has invented time travel. 

Doc's triumph is shortlived, as short-changed of one nuclear bomb, the Libyan terrorist cell (at a point where Islamic terrorists were still a punchline), make themselves known, gun down Doc Brown, and, leaping into the DeLorean, so Marty attempts to escape them, inadvertently travelling back in time to 1955. The car out of nuclear (and indeed, normal) fuel, so Marty enters his home town on foot, to find it utterly changed, the mix of period detail and an imagined 1955 masterfully done. The effect is simple, but beautifully executed--to capture something that is at once familiar-most of the key buildings including Marty's school and the town hall, are instantly recognisable-or utterly alien, such as the open farmland that will eventually become the town's shopping mall, or the beginning of the construction of the sprawl of the suburbs.

It is here that the film's two central conceits set up and slowly execute over the space of the next hour-Marty must get back to the future of 1985 via the DeLorean, and Doc Brown, who slowly piece together a plan involving the upcoming lightning strike that will forever stop the town hall's clock, which the duo plan to power the DeLorean's return to the present using. However, coming across first his father, then, in an inadvertent attempt to save him from being run over, his mother, Marty finds himself unexpectedly meddling with his parents-meet cute, and must race for his very existence to get them (back) together, before their relationship, his siblings, and Marty-never exist.

Back to the Future is a timecapsule of a film-it's easy, as films like Stand by Me, and Dirty Dancing did slightly later in the decade, to consider Back to the Future as looking back to the halcyon 1950s of Zemeckis and executive producer Steven Spielberg’s childhoods, recreating the teenage experience of growing up with hot rods and jukeboxes and two-dimensional bullies and pulpy science fiction and school dances. Even midway through a decade that could not help but look back with nostalgia at a simpler, and increasing mythologised time, Back to the Future is occasionally maudlin with its love of an earlier time. It occasionally plays with the formula-the arrival of "Johnny B Goode" midway through the Enchantment Under the Sea dance is a knowing wink, as Marvin Berry scurries to the phone to inform his unseen-and far more famous-cousin of the arrival of rock and roll, or Marty's earlier "invention" of skateboarding, but more often than not, it plays to the status quo.

Back to the Future's depiction of the 1950s, though, is now a time capsule within a time capsule-we are now further from 1985 than Marty was from 1955, and whilst we spend barely half an hour of the film in the present, it remains a masterfully done mix of the period as it remains remembered today, and at its most aspirational. But moreover, for many who have grown up with the film, this represented their home-life, never quite fitting in, or stymied by parents in imperfect marriages, or by things that happened before they were born. For a couple of hours, not only did BTTF answer what it would be like to spend time with your parents as teenagers, but to remind the kids of the 80s their parents were not so very different from them. It's the perfect encapsulation of the decade, captured on celluloid forever, looking backwards and capturing the modern at once. Small wonder a fourth film, despite its impossibility, remains tantalising.

Nearly 40 years after its release, thus, Back to the Future remains a masterfully deft piece of family science fiction, its time-travelling central conceit rarely matched in cinema since, its central performances transforming Lloyd and Fox into household names. It remains at once, a perfect slice of 80s cinema at its best, and a remarkably deftly made film about nostalgia, childhood, and family that manages to feel fresh to this day

Rating: Must See

Next week, we swap the family friendly films of the 1980s for a planet-load of xenomorphs in the triumphant return of the Alien franchise in one of the greatest sequels ever made: Aliens

Support the blog by subscribing to my Patreon from just £1/$1.00 (ish) a month to get reviews up to a week in advance and commission your very own review! https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond.