“Back To The Future” was the #1 movie in 1985 at the box-office, even whipping then Reagan-America poster boy Rambo by good measure. With Zemeckis and Gale back, along with the rest of the cast and crew (save for a major exception), they decided to shoot their two sequels simultaneously.
Before the “Matrix” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchises, this concept was rather radical in Hollywood at the time. With #2 set for Thanksgiving 1989, and #3 for summer 1990, it potentially seemed like two chicken dinner winners for Universal within almost 6 months of each other. Right?
With Fox and Lloyd back as our time travelers from 1985, they drive off to 2015, where they have to prevent a major catastrophe for one of Fox’s future offspring. While in the future, Fox buys a sports almanac, with the intent of getting the edge on sports betting in the future. It falls into the hands of “Biff” (Wilson), who proceeds to steal the De Lorean time machine back to 1955, making for a quite lousy-looking alternative reality of 1985. The duo must correct this situation, or a paradox of fatalistic implications for the universe will occur.
Skipping the nostalgic, emotional humor of the first film, this is an adventure picture with a decent first act, a really good second act, and a third act that’s brilliant on paper, but somehow lacks something definitive in the end.
First off, the future of 2015 is like every other Hollywood take on what the “future” is. That is, radical urban and transportation metamorphosis within 20-30 years that is just unrealistic. As I write this review, nine years from a future of flying cars, hover board skateboards, and very gay-looking fashion, I’m still stuck having to drive a fossil fuel-guzzling vehicle. Still, unlike other films, this picture at least attempts to poke fun at such a future. Though the insanely silly retro-love for the 1980s was prophesized in this picture by almost two decades.
But it’s the second act that’s the best thing about this movie. The first film was about some Californian punk kid that screwed up time, fixed it up to “better” condition, and returned to a “better” reality where his pops wasn’t a puss, his family wasn’t poor, and had a friggin BMW in the driveway. Now with the sequel, the altered world of 1985 is one where the high school burned to the ground, armed militias in tanks run the streets, and Biff runs the city as a despot. It’s like the cynical European art house version of “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
Though really, the fact that the baddie made a sky rise of a hotel/casino out of a courthouse will always have street cred in my book.
The third act itself is conflicting. Zemeckis and Gale decided that instead of basically rehashing the first movie’s tempo, why not simply go back to the first film, seeing scenes from it in different angles and actually witnessing it? Certainly a stroke of genre-ingenuity, but there is a downside to this concept. There is Déjà vu, pun not intended, from watching it, to which my care for the story slowly drained away from the film.
I enjoyed the film, but some things just bugged me to which explains for my score rating. Crispin Glover’s absence, with the film being written around this fact, is sorely lacking. The fact that Zemeckis was editing this film while shooting “Back to the Future Part III” does explain the inconsistent editing narrative in the film (and which even Zemeckis admits as much).
Never mind that you had this girlfriend character of Fox’s character that is so useless, one wonders if Zemeckis and Gale couldn’t simply find a way to use her more interestingly instead of being such a dead-end trail.
