Looking back from the Future to Back to the Future

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2015)

October 21, 2015 – the faithful date at which point the present became the future, and, as of now, the past. Head hurting yet? That's okay, as there has never been so seamless a blending of nostalgia and time travel as in Robert Zemeckis' breezily legendary adventure saga. Interestingly, Parts I and II often get lumped together in the public unconsciousness – fair enough, as Part II operates in part as a 'Greatest Hits' recap of the first. Still, it's fairly important to distinguish, as, temporal overlap aside, Part II is very much its own animal – and not always in a pleasant way.
The film is essentially a three act, and, correspondingly, three-time affair. Act 1, 'The Future' (aka: the part that everyone remembers), is thoroughly in the vein of the original – a vivaciously animated affair, chock full with fun, sci-fi escapism. Of course, as we now inhabit the realm of 'the future', this comes with the added pleasure of compiling lists of 'things they got right' and 'things they overestimated' (I'm still waiting for my hoverboard, let alone flying car – where the '80s-futurism fashion aesthetic sits is still up for grabs). Here, Zemeckis' imagination goes into wacky overdrive, with clever gags aplenty (the 3D Jaws 19 – "This time it's really, REALLY personal" is priceless, while the 'antique store' is funny for an entirely different reason now that cassette tapes qualify as such) and a hoverboard chase that could have been ripped from Part I, while allowing Michael J. Fox and Lea Thompson to totter around in aging prosthetics as their 'future selves' is worth a giggle or two. Yes, there's a blip of eyebrow-raising discomfort at opening the film with Doc drugging protagonist Marty McFly's girlfriend Jennifer (this time, Elizabeth Shue – did anyone notice the switcharoo?) and abandoning her, unattended, by a dumpster (umm), but the flux capacitor is otherwise cranked firmly to 'zany' here. And hey – anything with cameos from Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and baby Elijah Wood in his first acting role can only be awesome. It's really quite a shame we don't get more time here (ha), as it's in this beginning segment that the film really soars.
But then: as the film leaps back to its (alternate) past, there's not such much of a tonal shift as a paradigm shift. Suddenly, we're in the midst of a disconcerting It's a Wonderful Life tribute on steroids - a dark, hellish wasteland of derelict housing, surly bikers, and imposing, sinister casinos, masterminded by Biff's deranged Donald Trump doppelgänger (who, yes, even in the 80s, was based on Donald Trump- the film's most chilling prophecy). Candy-coloured, whizz-bang adventure aside, the Back to the Future saga was never wholeheartedly saccharine - there's always been resonantly somber stuff about aging, bullying, and going through life perennially unsatisfied to chew on. Still, in this dark pit of coercive, abusive marriages, corruption, and murder, all played oddly nonchalantly, it's no wonder that the recurring "What are you – chicken?" gag loses its gas when juxtaposed with a sequence of McFly sobbing in a cemetery.
Yeah - didn't remember all that, did you? I didn't think so.
The sad truth is that the film as a whole can't justify such a distressingly macabre tangent. Most other It's a Wonderful Life spin-offs are careful to provide plenty of joy to counteract and contextualize their dark diversions. Here, we're stranded with preciously few of the iconic cheerful bits of Part I (no Huey Lewis and the News here), leaving little to latch onto. Even the final third, retreading the 50s-set jauntiness of its predecessor, is really more strained and convoluted, shoehorning in too many artificial conflicts, to be as fun or clever as it should be. By the time Zemeckis wraps it up with a 'to be continued' teaser for Part III, it's pretty hard to keep the frustration and feeling of being cheated at bay.
Still, it's hard to beat the unquenchable sky-high charisma of the unforgettable double-act of Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. While both are largely restricted to forwarding plot pieces than given memorable lines or character beats here, there's still no disputing that Marty McFly and Doc Brown remain among the most beloved and resilient of characters to ever grace the screen (even if the comparative scarcity of Doc here becomes steadily more of a disappointment). What is it a bit more objectionable is the surplus of Thomas F. Wilson's legendary butthead Biff. The larger-than-life, unapologetically awful Biff has always worked best as a foil for the more loopy and cheerful protagonists, but promoting Wilson to principle player here makes his obnoxious negativity more exhausting than enjoyable (although Wilson exploring new dimensions of surreal over-the-top performance as Biff's cybernetically warped descendant Griff in the 2015 segment is always good for a laugh, albeit a vaguely disconcerted one).
Thankfully, Back to the Future Part II still upholds enough of the charming whimsy of the first to still provide a raucously entertaining ride, combined with even more brain-teasing time travel trickery to mull over for years to come. It is a shame that, 2015 sequence aside, the film feels more manufactured and becomes so unreasonably dark that it loses a lot of the joy and spontaneity of its predecessor. However, for magnanimous audiences already infatuated with the peerlessly magnetic McFly and Doc Brown, this hop into the DeLorean is likely to provide just as much of a slice of movie magic as you could wish for.
-6.5/10