Corny no doubt but still awesome.

Rating: Null/10 (20 July 2005)

This is as typical of a teen eighties movie as you can get, in fact the eighties might have been the decade that those teen movies were invented, if not then this is when they definitely got popular. The formula is generally the same, there is a self assured kinda rebellious young man who sometimes gets in trouble, has a nice girlfriend, and gets into all kinds of trouble. He listens to cool music, says "ayyyyyyy" a lot, and most of the time has some sort of mullet. Some of the teen movies are good, some of them awful, but this one is a cut above the rest, Back to the Future is one of the best movies of the 1980's, and 80's superstud Michael J. Fox leads off this excellent movie. He plays Marty McFly, a high school kid who hangs out with the crazy scientist Dr. Brown, a wacky spaced out inventor played to perfection by Christopher Lloyd. The performances of Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd and their chemistry really are what make this movie they are perfect for their parts and really make this the movie that it is.
The plot is very nice too. We see Marty McFly's neighborhood before anything was there, and it was just open land. We see the small town he lives in when it was much smaller in size, and there wasn't so much expansion. We see a lot of cool stuff in this movie. This is a movie that holds your interest through the entire thing. I have to admit I am a science fiction fan, and I have always been fascinated wit the concept of time travel, and while this movie is a complete fantasy (they travel back in time in a Delorean) It is also interesting to see the makeup jobs in this movie, we see characters 30 years in the past, and we see 40 year old people playing people who are twenty years old and vice versa. The highlight of the movie remains Christopher Lloyd, who plays what might be his best part ever, he is just too funny for words, and is so over-the-top he gives this movie the perfect tone, and compliments everyone around him with his great performance.
The story progresses nicely, the last half hour is priceless, as we see Michael J. Fox play Johnny Be Good to a crowd who has never heard rock and roll as we know it. Then he goes back to the future and he almost misses it. The movie has the Quantum Leap aspect of it as we see what opens when you alter the past which affects the present in ways we never would have thought of. This movie is both a nice timepiece for the fifties and the eighties, showing at least the way that people in both time would like to have thought they were, in an idealistic world, so the movie is interesting like that, and has a nice touch of comedy, and science fiction here. The two genre's mesh well here, and sometimes Science Fiction and comedy don't always go well together. (see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) It is also kind of funny to see the time period conflict with each other, we see things that are done in the eighties, and not in the fifties and vice versa. While there are no belly laughs in the movie there are enough jokes and enough interesting moments that will definitely make you think, this is not a socially conscious movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it is something that is very interesting. This movie is probably the centerpiece of Michael J. Fox's film career, he rarely had a films this successful other than the two sequels, and this was a monster hit for the day. While it is one of the best eighties movies it is also one of the best about time travel, corny it might be but Back to the Future remains one of the best of it's kind, it's kinda hard to classify, but of whatever genre it is, it is one of the best.