A Refreshing Take on Time-Travel

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2014)

Time travel and the possibilities it offered, of altering the past, knowing the future, meeting people/beings from the future, has always fascinated people. Renowned authors from H.G Wells and Isaac Asimov to Charles Dickens have given their interpretation of time-travel. Hollywood too brought out movies like Terminator and the Star Trek franchise. They had all used it on a grand scale, to explore things like ethics and/or future societies. Nobody thought of placing it in a simple high-school setting and using it to comic effect until Back to the Future came along.
A teenager, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is accidentally transported to 1955 (which is 30 years ago since the present day for this movie is 1985). There he interferes with the moment his high-school-age parents meet, to fall in love later, thereby endangering his own existence. To prevent that from happening, Marty has to play match-maker to his parents.
What we have is a very entertaining comedy full of enjoyable characters like the eccentric scientist, Doc (Christopher Lloyd), the school bully, Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) and his sidekicks, Marty's parents, Lorraine (Lea Thompson) and George (Crispin Glover) and the school principal Strickland (James Tolkan). It also manages to have a few tense moments towards the end. It's funny, it's intelligent, and it expands the scope of time-travel by focusing on smaller events.