Take me away, I don't mind

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2016)

Now more than 30 years after its release it's virtually impossible to review BTTF and say something that is new. Almost all observations of the film have already been made and the chance that my review will seem stale and familiar has put me off for years, but now is the time to finally get it done.
Since there are as-of-yet undiscovered tribes in the heart of the Amazon jungle who already know the plot of Back to the Future I will forgo typing out a synopsis. Time travel is a tricky device when plotting movies. It can work in your favor or it can destroy you. Both the Terminator and Star Trek have suffered under the paradoxical strain of time travel. I suppose the main lure of the concept is the chance to go back and live key moments in your life and do them differently, putting right what once went wrong - the lifetime pursuit of Doctor Samuel Beckett.
Back to the Future is a pop culture giant for many reasons. The iconic poster art, the fire trails, the instantly recognizable DeLorean, the title font, the costume design, the locations, Alan Silvestri's thrilling score, Huey Lewis' emblematic theme tune, but mainly for the dual time period. 1985 was present day when it was released but as I type this review it is 31 years in the past. In 1985 the western world still had a naive innocence, a hope that the future could be bright. Culture was hedonistic, optimistic, willing to experiment. In the three decades since then we have become bitter, pessimistic, and cynical. Dystopia, dysfunction, and distrust has permeated the majority of households. We are no longer a society that plans for the future, only to struggle through the day-by-day grind of increasingly hopeless existence. We long for the glory days of 1985 and Back to the Future allows us to access that dream.
But there was an even more naive and innocent time, a world that Marty McFly finds himself trapped in with only a chance lightning strike to send him back home. 1955 Hill Valley (or Kingston Falls if you look at it from a Gremlins perspective) is a post-WWII Utopian Americana where the streets are clean, the world is safe, and the lifestyles are wholesome. It's a rose-tinted insight into forever gone era. Society has grown darker and darker over the decades. We all wish we had a nuclear-powered time machine to stop this ever-declining spiral and skew the timeline into an alternate present.
Back to the Future is a good movie, a great movie, a perfectly cast and acted movie, an all time best and a classic for all the right reasons, but its main appeal is that it makes the viewer think "what if I had that chance?" I think most people would sacrifice their comfortable familiarity of their known present to go back in time and radically change the future for the better, and what better style to do that in than a DeLorean?
This movie will never age. It's an icon of its era and a movie that defines an entire decade. It will stand the test of time (pun intended) and will appeal to each new generation for all of the above reasons.
That's just the power of love, man.