Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Michael J. Fox,Christopher Lloyd,Lea Thompson,Crispin Glover,Thomas F. Wilson,James Tolkan
Simply put, Back to the Future is the best sci-fi movie to come out of
the 80’s, as long as you’re willing to forget about a certain George Lucas
creation. (Which, coincidentally, there is reference to.) It may not have the
best special effects or acting, but it has a fun plot and the greatest time
machine ever built. That’s right, I speak of the DeLorean. There is no cooler
car on Earth and never has there been a cooler version of a time machine in a
movie. EVER. When you add that to a cute Michael J. Fox, some kick-ass tunes by
Huey Lewis, and some mind-bending talk about the space-time continuum, you have
one of the top ten movies of the decade.
The movie revolves around Marty McFly (Fox), a teenager with a family as dull
as rocks, not to mention a dad that still gets beaten up by the local bully,
Biff Tanner (Wilson). Marty is friends with Dr. Emmett Brown (Lloyd), a nutty
scientist who built a time machine, after inventing the “motor” behind it
(the flux capacitor) in a bathroom accident. (Granted, it may not be the
greatest way to invent a time machine, but who cares? It’s just fun to say “flux
capacitor.”) Unfortunately, to power the DeLorean, he needs plutonium, and the
only place to get it is from Libyan terrorists. Needless to say, they aren’t
happy when Doc steals it and come after him late one night. (When watching this
part, I suggest you start yelling “It’s the Libyans!!!” a few times. It
really doesn’t make the movie any better, but my friends and I sure have fun
doing it.) Marty watches Doc get shot, then jumps into the DeLorean to avoid the
same fate. While racing around a mall parking lot, he hits the magical 88-mph
and the DeLorean whisks him back to 1955. After running into his dad (Glover),
Marty inadvertently messes up the first meeting between his mom (Thompson) and
dad, ruining the space-time continuum and causing his 1985 family to start
disappearing. Marty spends the rest of the movie trying to fix this mistake,
figuring out how to power the DeLorean to get him home (Libyan terrorists aren’t
easy to find in 1955), running away from young Biff, and trying to keep his mom
from making out with him.
The interaction between Marty and Doc Brown is continually hilarious and the
repeated attempts by Marty’s mom to make out with him will make you cringe as
you replace the characters with your own family members in your mind. There are
some classic scenes in this movie, and in all reality, it is probably the reason
why Fox is as big a star as he is today. Back to the Future is a great
way to relive your childhood, when you still thought time machines could exist,
and skateboarding was cool. If you hated the 80’s, your childhood, Huey Lewis,
or think that it’s about time that Michael J. Fox hit puberty, then you should
simply be drawn and quartered (or made to watch one of those crappy teen-flicks,
i.e. Skulls, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, that have plagued the
90’s.)
