One of the finest Sci-Fi movies ever

Rating: 8/10 (2 August 2005)

Even though I'm still convinced that the eighties are one of the worst decades in recent history when it comes to movies and music and even though I never liked Sci-Fi movies, there is one big exception to that rule. In my opinion "Back to the Future" is not only one of the best movies in the genre, it's also in my list of all time favorite movies. When I saw it for the first time, I remember to be blown away by it. But than again, I was only 10 years old, not exactly an age on which you've already seen many really good movies to which you can compare another one. But even now, 20 years after its first release and after I've seen hundreds of movies, I still like it a lot.
It's 1985 and Marty McFly is a typical teenager who doesn't like his parents and who has some problems at school. His best friend is Doc Brown, a weird inventor of all kinds of (useless) machines. But this time he has invented something that is much more interesting. He has created a plutonium-powered time machine based on a DeLorean. But when something goes wrong, Marty is accidentally sent back to 1955, the time in which his parents still were young. Not only has he got to adapt to this entirely new environment, he also has to make sure that nothing is changed, because that might have serious consequences for the future...
I guess the best reason why this movie works so well and feels so timeless is because they don't use the time machine to go forward. Instead of showing us the future, which wouldn't look exactly like it is right now, they have chosen to go back 30 years, a time period which they new very well and could recreate perfectly. If they hadn't done this, the movie would have felt dated one day and no-one would have liked it because it was far from possible. Another good thing about this movie is the acting. Take for instance Michael J. Fox. Not everything that he has done in his career was very successful, but in this movie he shines. I truly believe that this is one of his best performances ever. The same for Christopher Lloyd. Even though his Dr. Emmett Brown looks like if he could have come out of a cartoon, his acting gives the character something likable and makes you forget about that 'problem'.
Overall I really liked this movie a lot. It's one of the finest examples in Sci-Fi movies and I can keep watching it time after time. That's why I believe that this movie doesn't deserve a rating lower than 8/10.