Retro Reviews – the Back to the Future Trilogy

Robert Baker dusts off his time machine and looks back at the trilogy that made a hoverboard the first thing on every 80s kid’s Christmas wishlist…

There’s only one trilogy in my house, and it ain’t Wars or Rings; it’s Future, and more specifically the Back to the Future trilogy

The first was released during a period of Hollywood when Columbian Marching Powder was the unofficial writing partner on many a blockbuster script; mullets were almost mandatory, and any film starring Rodney Dangerfield had to close-out to a crowd dancing their way to the prospect of some alcohol fuelled sex, an angry looking douche-bag and bad-guy of the show looking miffed just off stage left.

The BTTF trilogy tells the tales of adventure undertaken by the questionably sane scientist Doc Emmet Brown and his friendship with an apparently cool and hip yet still wholly impressionable high-school teenager Marty McFly.

Starring Michael J. Fox in lead protagonist role as Marty McFly, Christopher  Lloyd as a wild-haired scientist, and directed by the radical Robert Zemecis, the first Back to the Future film told the tale of time-travel, incest, and a most triumphant guitar solo worthy.

The first in the trilogy sees Marty jumping from fire-pan to flame throughout the expanse of a story that begins with an ill-judged attempt at getting a DeLorean past the eighty MPH mark on the speedometer.

Taking inspiration from the world of What If’s the first film centres around Marty’s accidental involvement in the story of his own birth. He has to not only somehow get his geek of a father and nymph of a mother dropping sprogs as nature and history intended, but also deal with the small matter of fulfilling the film’s Peter Griffin moment of having one of the characters quote the name of the film within the film itself to get Back To The Future.

Unlike Empire… the second in the series is perhaps the weakest of the three, hover-boards and an over emphasis on the consequences of trying to change the future by messing with the past. The much remembered visit to the year 2015 lasts barely twenty full minutes, and with a somewhat forced sub-plot involving main antagonist Biff Tannen  becoming main-plot requiring the film to essentially become a re-tread of the first,  it carries us through to third and final film.

For Part three, going out with a bang Zemekis conjures up all the boyhood fantasies of a generation raised on the Lone Ranger, Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie, and delivers a Wild West romp. This time it takes the attention from the McFly fiasco and instead looks at the Lloyd love interest, to whit teacher and school ma’m Clara Clayton.

Even though it ramps up the self-reverential parody it does so with a wry and well-written acknowledgement to the audience’s own reaction, and stops the series becoming too formulaic as we wait to see the series’ own ‘Ewok Ending’.

Robert Baker