When Time Traveling, Avoid Your Parents

Rating: 8/10 (12 March 2006)

There aren't too many time travel movies around, mainly because "The Time Machine," "The Time Travelers" and "Time After Time" films pretty much covered the subject. Then "Star Trek" used up the premise in its TV episodes and films, and there was even that "Time Tunnel" TV series in the mid-sixties. One option was to do such a movie with humor, pointing out the potentially absurd ramifications of traveling to your own past. So the main character of Marty McFly (Fox) ends up meeting his own parents when they were his age. Though this is a relatively tame comedy as far as teenage comedies of the eighties, there is the risky Oedipal element of Marty's own mother having the hots for him. This concept is then tossed aside near the end when, in a rather lame scene, his mom stops her advances because she suddenly feels like she's kissing her own brother. Disney should've went with this after all - it's possibly the least offensive picture of the decade and probably also explains its huge popularity - everyone could enjoy it.
What elevates this above the common film are a few things: Glover's performance as Marty's father, both in younger & older incarnations, is deliriously eccentric; where everyone else is kind of in TV-movie mode, he's off in his own zone and hard to forget. There's an energy to the entire story thrust (from director Zemeckis), helped by Fox, who always seems anxious about something. The concept of time travel itself gets a clever redux here; we find out you can actually change reality in the present by your actions in the past - there's no mention of creating a parallel universe, for example. The ending is pretty strong, throwing in an extra whammy when we think things are over and everything is back to exactly the way it was. And it's very entertaining to watch Marty explore the fifties - we see through his eyes - the culture shock and making various connections between the older and new decades is a nice routine. There were also a couple of wildly funny moments involving Marty dressed up as an alien from outer space.