Robert Zemeckis Brings the Sci-Fi/ Fantasy Genre 'Back To' Life!

Rating: 9/10 (26 August 2015)

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a typical teenager growing up in the 80s. He hopes to make a man out of his milquetoast father, the middle-aged George McFly (a deliciously funny sad sack as played by 20-year-old Crispin Glover) who is still groveling at the feet of his former high school classmate, a perpetual bully named Biff. Marty's prim mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) appears to be drowning her frustrations in vodka. The movie does not really catch fire until, when testing out a souped-up DeLorean as a time machine with his eccentric, wide-eyed, wild-haired stork of a mad scientist friend Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown (played by the hilariously frazzled Christopher Lloyd), Marty is whisked back to 1955. Here, he comes face to face with his nerdy teenage dad and also his unrecognizably gorgeous mom. After inadvertently causing his own mother to become infatuated with him – who finds him an absolute dreamboat, it is left up to Marty to repair the course of time and ensure that she falls in love with his future father, George or face being erased out of existence altogether. To do so, he gets in touch with a young Doc, who is as much a fish out of water in the past as he is in the present, and persuades him to send him back to 1985. Can he put things right and return to the future before it's too late?
Director Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future represents that rare perfect matrimony of everything a film needs to succeed, from the adroit direction, the immaculately styled performances and the scintillating visual effects that never swamp the film. The constituent elements would not operate without the film's biggest triumph – its screenplay – which is among the most economic and brilliantly composed, for there are no disposable lines of dialogue; everything spoken is either cuttingly funny and heartfelt (check Doc excitedly describing the forthcoming high-school dance as "a rhythmic ceremonial ritual"), or employed to foreshadow a temporal event later in the film.
Anchoring it all is Fox's stumbling charm. The boyishly good-looking Fox is charming as the lead, exuding cocksure – yet never arrogant – buoyancy. Lloyd, meanwhile, nails his Einstein-on-acid role perfectly, never venturing too far into caricature, yet spinning the archetypal mad scientist role with a wink and a nod, making it unquestionably his signature performance. Together, they make an idiosyncratic couple, for sure, but a perfect one at that.
In Back to the Future, there is an effervescence to the filmmaking, a bubbling, giddy effortlessness that's almost addictive. It's ingenuity, time-traveling twist ups and wonderfully vibrant characters resonate in ways few films ever achieve. It is an unadulterated cinematic experience!