Back to the Future

      I saw this movie in a theater in 1985, the year it was released.  I didn't like Back to the Future.  My friend liked it.  I recorded myself on audio tape talking about why I didn't like Back to the Future.  I don't remember what I said, I no longer have the tape.  I spoke on there about Tim Burton's debut, Pee Wee's Big Adventure.  I found that movie a fresh viewing experience.  Back to the Future seemed a typical product of Hollywood narrative.  It's a Steven Spielberg production, directed by Robert Zemeckis.  I must've been aware of Zemeckis.  The year prior to Back to the Future, he directed a film I liked a lot, Romancing the Stone.  

     To see the film forty years later, age sixty-one, whereas at the time I was twenty-one, I see better what the movie accomplishes, something I missed at the time.  For me, the first clue as to why I rejected Back to the Future in 1985 comes in the beginning, with Steven Spielberg named as executive producer.  This is a Spielberg production.  At the time, I had formed in the previous year, 1984, an opinion of Spielberg's work that mostly still holds.  I saw Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a film I anticipated with pleasure, since I so enjoyed its predecessor, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

     What I got with the sequel was an excessive bore, plagued with overlong action sequences, prolonged climactic moments, a shrill leading lady, an absolutely fucking disgusting scene with enormous centipedes, and, worst of all, Short Round.  

     This menace to cinema, the character, not the actor, made me wish, in the theater as I watched him, that he would fall into an abyss.  

     I remember the film this way: 

     "Indy!  Indy!"  "Indy, help!"  "Indy!"  "Short Round?"  "Short Round, where are you?"  "Indy, over here!"  "Where did all these centipedes come from?"  "There's a fifteen inch centipede crawling down my negligee!"  "Short Round!  Take my hand!  I gotcha!"  "Boy, Indy, that was a close one!"  "Indy, there's an eyeball in my soup!"  "Stop complaining.  When in Rome."

     If Short Round, the character, not the actor, were in every film after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and I mean, every film, would his presence ruin even good films like Requiem For a Dream or bad films like Star Wars: Episode Who Gives a Fuck: The Rise of Skywalker, Spawn of Palpatine?

     When I saw that Spielberg was executive producer on Back to the Future, I recoiled inside.  I had liked his Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his Raiders, felt ho-hum about E.T., though I liked Dee Wallace Stone, what isn't there to like?

     Fortunately, Short Round did not destroy cinema.  Even a shitty film like the second Avengers could crush itself out of cinematic relevance.  The Short Round method of ruining filmgoing experiences can be witnessed in any movie in which the screenwriters, director, et al, give in to the stupid idea that they need an incredibly ridiculous and annoying character, a Short Round, to add energy to a production.  

     Also, I didn't think Kate Capshaw was any good in that film.  She married Spielberg in spite of the centipede scene, so we can assume she wanted to help him achieve his artistic goals, no matter how childish and revolting.  An inexperienced actress at the time, she did her best--I will not fault her for displaying enthusiasm throughout the hokey plot involving a death cult in India.  If Spielberg had picked some other actress to play the role, like Goldie Hawn, the movie would've approached fun, and been fun when Goldie's on screen.

     Why talk about the Temple of Doom monstrosity instead of the main subject?  Because I'm getting to Back to the Future and Zemeckis as a director compared to Spielberg as a director.

     At the time, 1985, I only had Romancing the Stone to go on as regards Zemeckis's films.  That film, with Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito, is an entertaining and funny adventure story with a standout performance by Turner, an actress with an ambiance seemingly of another decade in film, as shown in Lawrence Kasdan's Neo-noir, Body Heat.  

     Zemeckis returned to small town America in the present (1985) day.  An appealing actor, Michael J. Fox, at the time still starring in a popular sitcom, Family Ties, has the lead role as Marty McFly, a high schooler skateboarder with a girlfriend named Jennifer (Claudia Wells, but Elisabeth Shue in the two sequels) and a somewhat eccentric family.  His mother, Lorraine, (Lea Thompson) drinks liquor from the bottle right after dinner, his father, George (Crispin Glover, who's very good in this film) has to have the television on during dinner so that he can watch The Honeymooners, by then a thirty year old TV show from a time soon to be visited by Marty McFly.

     He gets to 1955 via a time machine invented by Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown (Christopher Lloyd, in a masterful performance he somehow manages to keep from going over the top).  The machine: a customized (to say the least) DeLorean DMC-12, with a stainless steel body.  About 9,000 were made, and only one has a flux capacitor, the device allowing the spacetime continuum to have an aneurysm, transporting Marty McFly to his hometown in 1955, when his parents were seventeen year old high school seniors not yet romantically involved.  

     Marty's existence hangs on his pushover bullied father, young George McFly, getting up the nerve to ask Marty's mother, Lorraine Baines, to the upcoming school dance.  George, as expected, lacks the will to push back against his tormentors, led by Biff (Thomas F. Wilson), a large piece of meat with enough gray matter attached to his reptile brain to have the loyalty of three dumb pseudo-bully followers, one of whom is played by Billy Zane.

     Biff has it in for George McFly, who takes the abuse.  Marty, in the uncomfortable position of watching his father get humiliated in public, finally slugs Biff, knocking him down.  This leads to a chase with Marty on an improvised skateboard and Biff and company in his sweet convertible.  There are many beautiful 1950s cars in the film, a little bonus for those who like looking at cars when they were interesting to look at.  

     Biff and friends up colliding with a manure truck.  If this would have happened to Short Round I would've cheered.  

     I will not detail everything happening in Back to the Future, but I'll touch on some of the plot. 

     Marty finds Emmett Brown at his house, takes him to where the DeLorean is parked behind a billboard advertising the future site of the suburb where Marty will someday live.  Doc Brown repairs the machine to send Marty back to the future, but Marty knows that Doc will be shot by, get this, Libyan terrorists wanting back the plutonium Doc stole from them to fuel the time car.  

     Libya at the time was depicted in U.S. news media as the scary Islamic terror state of the time.

     Meanwhile, in 1955, Marty has encountered, by a literal traffic accident, his mother and her family, the Baineses.  His mother comes on to her time traveling son.  One party knows of the potential incest, the other doesn't.  Marty backs out of that quick as lightning.  He finds out that his mother drank even at seventeen, and smoked cigarettes.

     The main goal of Marty's life in 1955 is to prevent his non-life if George and Lorraine remain mere high school acquaintances.  Marty carries a photo from the 1980s of himself with his younger sister and older brother.  When George and Lorraine drift, or something happens that turns her away from George, the people in Marty's 1980s picture start to fade out as, apparently, another timeline tries to be created.

     Marty's plan to get his mother and father together at the high school dance succeeds.  Since it's vital to the climactic scenes I won't divulge what happens.  The film has been available for viewing since 1985.  It was first shown on television in 1988.  Who is Marty McFly's father?  Who is Luke Skywalker's father?  Most of us know the answers by now.  

     Why do I prefer Back to the Future to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?  Both are meant to be entertaining.  For me, Zemeckis's film succeeds, due, to a large degree, to its performers, Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, and Lea Thompson.  The premise and the pace are antic.  Fox, in those years, was spry, athletic, like a short basketball guard.  His energy propels the movie.  

     For those who love tech, the modified DeLorean DMC-12, gleaming dull silver in night scenes, is fun for the eyes.  It looks like a car that a teenaged Elon Musk may have seen in a magazine, or in the movie itself, and thought ahead to the Cybertruck, although that vehicle may have been inspired by the armored truck in Damnation Alley, a bad post-apocalyptic science fiction film I liked more than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

     Where Spielberg overdoes action, Zemeckis finesses it.  The chase by Biff and his goons of Marty on an improvised skateboard takes the viewer through the central commercial area of the town, a place seen in three different time periods in the trilogy.  The chase scene lasts a minute or so, it's fun, it's creatively presented.  Spielberg's idea of an action scene is to make one huge fucking sandwich, when you requested a much smaller one.  With my eyes open, I can see the shrill beautiful woman, the archaeologist/adventurer, and Short Round in a coal car heading down, whipping around corners, the screaming and shouting incessant.  Nine years this scene goes on!

     Hyperbole, granted, but I remember sitting in the theater in 1984, ground down into my seat by my realization I was hating a film as I watched it.

     I've never felt that way watching the Zemeckis films I've seen.  He's just a better filmmaker than Spielberg. 

Vic Neptune