This One Fires the Flux Capacitor 'Back' Up - Straight 'to the Future'!

Rating: 9/10 (8 February 2016)

Back to the Future Part II begins where Part I left off, in 1985 at the Hill Valley home of teenager Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox, who is an absolute hoot in quintuple roles). Marty's scientist friend, Doc Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd, back again in his signature performance), has just arrived with dire news of the future. So Marty and Doc settle back in the time-hopping DeLorean (you know, the one with the flux capacitor) and the new film skips ahead thirty years to 2015, to find Marty's son, Marty Jr., getting in some trouble with Griff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), the grandson of Marty's 1955 nemesis Biff. This situation resolves itself fairly quickly, but not before old Biff steals the time machine to go back to 1955 and present his teenage self with a copy of a sports almanac that the young man uses to make himself a billionaire, turning 1985 into an altered hellish nightmare fantasy - Marty's dad is dead and Biff Tannen is married to Marty's mom, Lorraine. Marty and Doc, protected somehow from the effects of the change - though for how long, it's hard to say - head to 1955 themselves to stop Biff from changing the time-line. Naturally enough, this leads to both of them interacting, in potentially dangerous ways, with the plot of the first movie.
It says quite a lot about director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale's enduring strengths that what I just wrote makes absolutely perfect sense while you're watching it. And that all the jerry-rigged elements concocted at the end of the movie harmonize rather effortlessly with the original, turning casual gags into clever foreshadowing and building recurring motifs out of one-liners, while also providing a fine story that hangs together and is perfectly effective on its own. It's in 2015 that most of the whiz-bang awesomeness of the movie is found, not just in the staggeringly over-detailed production design - skateboards are replaced by flying hover-boards, the Jaws series is up to number 19 and the Chicago Cubs finally win another series - but in Zemeckis' embrace of technological gewgaws. The film knows just how, and when, to entertain us, and it does so in spades.
Zemeckis takes the sequel narrative and splices it into the intricate web of the first feature. The first two Back to the Futures ask a number of unresolved and unresolvable questions about causality, order, and intention; and taken as a pair, they're a hell of a lot of fun. That's what separates a top-drawer talent like Zemeckis from a routine hack: he can make an entertaining trifle meant to sell popcorn, and still infuse it with all kinds of structural inquiry.
Back to the Future Part II is simultaneously an entertaining follow-up to Part I and a tantalizing introduction to Part III - a giddily and merrily mind-boggling sci-fi fantasy.