Fantastic

Rating: Null/10 (4 November 2015)

I recently celebrated October 21, 2015 by re-watching the Back to the Future trilogy. And they were amazing. I had quite honestly forgotten just how good they were, just how funny, innovative, crazy, fast and quotable. And this is the one that started it all, and is easily the best film in the whole trilogy, which is saying a lot, keeping in mind the utter amount of quality all of them have.
We all know the story. Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) has invented a time machine, and wants his young friend Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) to act as a witness for the first trial run. But things don't go as planned - do they ever - and Marty is flung back into the past where he has to figure out how he can get, you guessed it, back to the future. Great, amazing basic story, but what really makes this one of the most iconic time travel films ever made is the amount of detail they put into the world and the characters. The very first scene, for example, of Marty stepping into Doc's house looking for him is filled with vast amounts of little touches that all tell a story, both about Doc and Marty.
And the movie just keeps going. All of the characters are very memorable and just the right amount of over the top and exaggerated. From Marty's ultimate wimp of a father George (Crispin Glover) to Biff (Thomas F. Wilson), who's such a massive Hollywood bully that it's a wonder he hasn't spontaneously combusted from sheer stereotypicality. But all that's part of the fun and the characters are played so well and the movie is so light in tone that their over the topness actually works for the film's advantage.
The score by Alan Silvestri is also fantastic, one of the most iconic movie soundtracks in cinema history. Whenever the main theme blasts from the screen you're flung straight into an adventure. The special effects are also surprisingly decent. Sure there are some obvious computer effects, but they were very good for their time and luckily the film relies mostly on practical effects.
Saying anything more would frankly spoil the movie too much. But trust me when I say that this is one of the finest adventure films ever made. It's cinema enjoyment distilled into its purest form. It's a sin I hadn't seen it in such a long time. A mistake which shall not be made again.