Fun...and prescient

Rating: 9/10 (12 October 2010)

Back to the Future and its two following parts take the time travel genre from HG Wells social criticism to social satire and beyond. While chock-full of '80s cues (the dress, designer labels/celebrities and Pepsi Free-remember that?), the film still manages to be eerily prescient. In 2015 you may buy a "Mr. Fusion" portable reactor that produces at least 1.2 gigawatts, but your flying car still runs on gas pumped at the Texaco station. What does that say about EV cars in the next few years? OK, there are no hover boards...but flat-panel TVs have all but erased tubes from memory, there's Major League baseball in Miami (or will be shortly) and the social decline of "traditional" white, middle-class suburbia is already widespread. And unlike those "other" depictions of the '50s, it wasn't all bobby-socks and sax; there was sex (and rape) too. The third episode is pure fun-the railroad sequence borrowing heavily from the Marx Bros-and I still get a hoot from the "beard band" playing Doubleback on the fiddle. A great romp through time.