One of the 80's best, even if final scene is morally-weak

Rating: 8/10 (1 January 2005)

Doc Brown, local character & mad-scientist, gets mixed up with Lybian terrorists who vow to murder him. All the old guy wants to do is to perfect time-travel for his own enjoyment...he wants to witness the birth of Christ and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, etc. Brown's only friend is a typical teenager, Marty McFly, who ain't yet sophisticated enough to know trouble when he encounters it. With Doc Brown seriously-wounded, but the Doc's plutonium-driven time-machine-cum-Delorean-sportscar very functional, 17-year-old Marty scrambles to escape murder himself...in fleeing, he goes back to the teen world of the 1950's and finds himself an unadmirable pal, who's actually his dad at age 18. Young "dad" is a pushover for bullyboys, he's a clumsy peeping-tom and a depressed, whining escapist who'll probably never amount to anything but a small-town failure. Marty tries to help his future-dad and ends up making matters worse for awhile. Our hero's in an almost-impossible situation and makes us laugh at his misfortune. I'll always stop and watch this almost-great movie whenever it rears it's head on the boob-tube. It's wonderful fun, from the faulty Rube Goldberg mechanics in the first scene, right through development of Doc Brown's hilarious self, then into Marty's frantic sexual unease when his own mother throws herself at him (quite innocently!). I'd thought all time-travel plot possibilities had been exhausted before this movie hit the big screen, but it proved me wrong with all kinds of clever elements, such as no one in the 1950's knowing what TV reruns were, how odd the clothing of 1983 would look to people 30 years back "What's with the life-preserver, kid? Ya just jump ship?", or the unfabulous treatment of blacks back in the fabulous 50's. We see an element or two of the future smartly interplayed with the time-travel plot, such as when Marty finds his 19-year-old brother's head missing from an 1980's wallet-photo he carries of his family, foretelling doom to the unborn if Marty doesn't fix what he just screwed up in the past. In 1953, Marty pleads with a much-younger Doc Brown to save his own life, but the ethical scientist refuses. So, we're now mighty sure that Marty is stuck in '53 and that he'll meet himself as a boy when he reaches middle age, or end up in some wild Oedipel-time-warp sexual life of sin. Even that comes off as funny. Naturally, in an adventure-comedy, everything turns out right (almost) in the end. The movie has a message for us, in the last scene. And, unblessedly, the message is a shallow, modern piece of Me-Generation horsedump. It tells us that parents can be "with it" if they encourage sexual-immorality in their teenagers, that the accumulation of material wealth and popularity are what matters and that worship of self is the ultimate guarantor of "success". But, the blessings of the DVD player are upon me, and I can ffwd the action from when Marty wakes up, fully-dressed, safely back in his 1983 bedroom, through to the closing credits!!