A Wasted Opportunity - SPOILERS

Rating: Null/10 (6 September 2004)

For my money the final scene in Back To The Future is perfection. Intended as a joke, a riposte to the neat, happy endings we are usually offered, it completely blew me away (a similar, though less effective, ending occurs in Joe Dante's 'Inner Space'). In 1989 virtually the same scene opened Back To The Future Part II. I was worried. As an ending the sudden shift in tone, the zaniness, works. It is unexpected and yet welcomed. As an opening scene it is a disaster. We end up with a follow up to a joke ending. Suddenly Doc Brown is shouting all the time, racing around and looking maniacal. He behaves not how he did throughout the first film but how he did for the first film's ending. Jennifer goes from being a cool customer ('How 'bout a ride Mister?') to the most annoying and offensively realized female character in a film since Willie Scott ('I wonder where we live, I bet it's a big house with lots of kids...'). Why does she have to spend most of the film asleep? Surely she could have been involved in the adventures? Her role could have been similar to Marty's in the first film. Humour could have been derived from her unwillingness to treat it all as another day at the office as Marty and Doc are now able to. Instead, to the film's detriment, she is treated like a prop and written as an idiot ('You should be able to convince her that it was all a dream'). Marty, who had already completed his character arc, suddenly has anger issues and an unsettling desire to be rich. It all feels very forced because that's exactly what it is. Biff Tannen was ideal in the first film as a supporting character. Now the entire plot rests on his shoulders. Watching the moment in the opening scene where he comes out to see the Delorean taking flight and disappearing, the sudden transformation he goes through from subservient lackey to sinister bad guy, makes you realize just how desperate the whole endeavour is. Lorraine McFly has to be one of the least independent female characters ever committed to celluloid. Apparently her appearance and personality is controlled by which type of man she is with ('You were the one who wanted me to get these things...'). On her wedding day we see that she is extremely uncomfortable with Biff which begs the question as to why is she going through with it. Is she so weak that she needs a man in order to know how to live her life? George is a wimp so she's an alcoholic, then George is a successful writer so she's healthy and happy, then Biff is evil and rich so she's a mess. What does this say about the filmmaker's view of women? A lot of the problems came from the decision to not pay Crispin Glover what he was asking to reprise his role as George McFly. I would love to know how much he wanted since the film loses much through his absence. Bob Gale looks extremely pleased with himself in the making of the Back To The Future trilogy documentary when he talks about his power as a screenwriter and how he was able to simply kill George McFly's character off, as if he'd done it in such a creative and subtle way that we'd hardly noticed. It's funny then that the whole thing seems so contrived and obvious and that it was necessary to use footage from the first film of Glover (without asking his permission) to fill in the gaps. Expertly done Bob. So confident is he of his writing prowess he fails to notice the one glaring error in his masterpiece. Doc is more than happy to tell Marty about problems his offspring will have thirty years from now but unwilling to tell him about a car accident he'll have the following day that will ruin his entire life, apparently to teach him a lesson. What a pal. It is all of these inconsistencies and miscalculations that make the second film such a disappointment. There are countless other problems, such as the terrible editing, the obvious, set-bound, artificiality of Biff's penthouse and the road by the Lyon's Estate billboard, Michael J. Fox and Thomas Wilson, both fine actors but neither of them exactly Alec Guiness, being forced to pull off multiple roles (And Fox's portrayal of a female corresponds with the depiction of female characters in the film), and the fact that Marty McFly is apparently some kind of silent, invisible entity throughout the last third of the film that only the audience can see and hear, but these things could have been forgiven if more thought had gone into the characters and the story.
In the DVD documentary Robert Zemeckis states that the sequels were going to be made whether he was involved or not. The fact that he decided to be involved shows that he didn't want someone else to make them. He needn't have worried. Back To The Future Part II feels like it was made by completely different people anyway. There is a smug laziness to the film, as if everyone knew the film was going to make money so why bother doing one's best. It is interesting to note the drop off in U.S. ticket sales between Back To The Future Parts II and III, once again proving that audiences aren't as dumb as the studios think. That Bob Gale has not enjoyed any success since also speaks volumes as to his talent. Overall I view the second part of the Back To The Future trilogy as a wasted opportunity and an insult to the fans of the first film.