Bad ending just adds to the disappointment.

Rating: Null/10 (23 January 2003)

In compliance with IMDb's guidelines, here warns the possible existence of spoilers ahead. Not there are any, but just in case. Okay, now onto BTTFIII. I want to express my particular outrage at this movie. Yeah, you've all read it before; I don't hate BTTF movies, I love them, but this one just doesn't belong in the same league as the others. And having the standard set so high with the first two films is insignificant in this case: This movie simply isn't very good. And this is where my outrage lies. This is a movie that tries to be science fiction, but it doesn't have enough sci-fi elements to justify being in the genre, apart from the time travel gags introduced in the previous two movies. This movie also tries to be a Western but is obviously so clichÃ©d and routine that apparently this story was conceived on the parts of both Zemeckis and Gale to satiate some childish filmmakers' fancy to do a Western movie. I don't have evidence to support this, but that doesn't mean it hardly makes sense. Look at Zemeckis's career up to the present day. Notice the kinds of projects he takes, the styles he employs, and the techniques he likes to use. None of the above indicate he has any talent to create a fine, Western epic. Then you have the subtle Western homages, like the inclusion of Patt Buttram as Roger Ebert pointed out in his review, and Doc Brown's line in Part I that said he intended to visit his favorite period in time, the Old West, may in fact be sentiment of Zemeckis and/or Gale. All I'm saying is that maybe Zemeckis wanted to do a Western someday, but knowing he didn't have the talent create a success from a "pure" Western, he decided to roll that idea into part of something more understandably crazy, a BTTF movie...Then maybe we'd all forgive him because he made a sci-fi film first and foremost, not a Western...Unfortunately, this particular story fits in very oddly with the rest of the trilogy. Ebert also stated how the other two were non-linear in their story telling, that all the time travel made for a story that flipped itself inside out while we all smiled at its eccentricity. (Part II was especially time travel madness heaven.) Apart from the scenes in the beginning of this film, which continues directly from Part II, the plot is extremely straightforward, with you classic action movie suspense devices with an Old West twist. Time travel is discussed as means of creating a purpose and direction for the plot, but no time traveling actually occurs after the beginning until final few minutes. BTTF's classic humor is ALL that saves this film from being unwatchable trash. And that brings me to another grievance: The nauseating recycling of established BTTF gags. This was a serious problem with the second movie, where you could easily pick out which gags from Part I were adapted into Part II, and there were far too many instances of those. The problem even blemished Part I, as a few jokes from early in the movie were rehashed later on, which aroused a slightly uncomfortable sense of superfluous repetition. Now this is not necessarily a bad technique, as it can make fans of a film franchise feel at home with all of the in-jokes; it's also just plain amusing to see how story of one movie connects almost directly with another in the series through some small detail. Unfortunately, this technique is extremely difficult to do effectively, and sadly the BTTF movies generally fail with it. Moving on, this film has a much more emphasized love story. Whereas Part II had elements of romance but no real love story, and Part I had a love story that merely served as a fuel for many gags, plot twists, and heck, the entire story. Part I's love story obviously wasn't meant in any way to be heartwarming to romance fans out there. This is quite different in Part III, where tremendous care has been taken to make this offbeat romance at least the slightest bit touching by inserting in all those cutesy google-eyed exchanges, that overplayed kiss under the stars, and of course, the internal debate whether to do what is right according to the principles of science or to give into to needs of the heart. However, in this film, the romance isn't warm like the filmmakers' might've wanted it to be, it's just plain freaky, and I don't mean in the guilty-pleasure S&M kind of way; it's romance between an eccentric old scientist (one of the last men you'd expect in a Hollywood romance) and an equally eccentric woman (which becomes more and more apparent as the movie goes on: For instance, **SPOILER** when the Doc tells Clara that he's from the future and he must return, instead of slapping or laughing at him thinking he's crazy, she gets upset because she thinks he has made up a Jules Verne-type fantasy to exploit her own imagination and break up with her with minimal heartbreak. Then, she stops the train on which she's leaving town just so she could run out and try to catch Brown before he's gone forever, and then she totally loses all semblance of sanity when she chases down and gets on the runaway train, recklessly risking her life just to catch up with Brown.), and that is HARDLY heartstring-tugging in my book. My biggest problem with this movie is its ending, which is probably one of the most poorly constructed endings in contemporary film history. It has a tacked on feel; it seems as if Zemeckis didn't want to upset his audience by ending his story with Marty not seeing the Doc again forever, so he made sure he had some way to bring the Doc back before the credits rolled. If this is the case, then the ending is even more unforgivable than it apparently is. Why? Though it doesn't seem to be pointed out very often these days, the ending is completely contradictory to a theme that was presented throughout most of the trilogy, that time travel is evil, that it should not have been invented, that it must be stopped, and all that philosophical talk about preventing further contamination of the time-space continuum. Ever since the first half of Part II, Doc Brown had been saying that the DeLorean should be destroyed, which he adamantly maintained until the machine was destroyed. Then what happens? Doc Brown comes back in a time machine made from a train! As cool as the train is (it's even better than the DeLorean), it just doesn't fit into the context. Also problematic is exactly how he created the train: It was reasonable to believe he could retro-fit a DeLorean because Part I told us that the Brown family was wealthy. However, how could the Doc come in possession of a train, and quite a train, when he's only the town's blacksmith? And assuming he did get a train somehow, how did he find the means to modify it into what you see? Granted, he did have that DeLorean buried in a mine with which he could've gotten some inspiration, but he himself could not, in the eight months he had lived there prior to Marty's arrival, fix the machine, which draws skepticism on his ability to build another time machine from scratch WITH PARTS NON-EXISTENT IN THE OLD WEST THAT HE WOULD'VE HAD TO INVENT HIMSELF. He would've also had to have installed the hover mechanism on his own, since that business in 2015 would only convert old cars, so traveling to the future would not have helped him much to improve his train. Also, how was he able to get those special parts manufactured in the Old West? The final little problem is that before Doc leaves again, he says the machine is powered on steam, which doesn't sound like a joke. So if it's not a joke, then how on earth does Zemeckis and Gale expect us to believe that a time machine can actually be powered by steam, a fairly weak source of power? The two previous BTTF movies had plot problems mainly with time paradoxes, especially Part II, but they were both very entertaining to watch. Part III is just ho-hum. There's just one thing that's sad about this trilogy: Unlike most franchises, this one was apparently conceived together as a trilogy, since various hints in Part I and Part II (especially II) indicated the story of this third film. (The ending of Part I also indicated what would happen in Part II.) That fact alone should've meant that all of the movies would've been approximately the same in quality, but this is not the case. Somehow, Zemeckis and Gale made up a story that just got worse and worse as it went along. And what's more: Like LOTR and The Matrix trilogy, Part II and III were simultaneously shot, which further should've produced a minimal drop-off in quality as in the case of those other two trilogies (though maybe not Matrix 2 and 3, since we haven't seen those yet). What went wrong?