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Why Back to the Future?
Back to the Future is the fifth movie on the list of movies I am going through for the CineCat project. It also happens to be a movie I have seen referenced endlessly for yers and years so I happen to be familiar with the various objects and lines from the movie—the DMC DeLorean, Doc’s crazy hair, the line about not needing any roads etc.
So I have been looking forward to watching this movie and getting the full picture of where all the references came from. This is my first time watching this movie and as far as I am aware this is my first time watching anything directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Let’s get into it.
The Movie
With a movie like Back to the Future it is a tad uninteresting to talk about the movie itself. There is so much of this movie that has seeped into popular North American culture that the paratext of this movie is more important to me than the movie itself. So I want to talk about that first.
Music is my primary connection to this movie. Huey Lewis, of Sports fame was tapped to make the theme song of the movie. The theme song is a track called Power of Love. Sports happens to be one of my favourite 80s rock albums, I listened to a fair bit of Huey Lewis and News as a teenager but I don’t remember Power of Love. That said when the song started playing in the movie, the musical style felt familiar that I felt myself wondering if it was Huey Lewis. A shot of Marty’s bedroom with a Sports poster on the wall confirmed that connection.
There is also of course the DMC DeLorean, a car I have seen referenced many a time over the years and I am fairly certain it was in one of the Forza Horizon games I’ve played years ago. It is an iconic and very memorable design, I don’t think I have seen another car quite like that. It is not a car design style that is in vogue, and reading up on the car it seems that the popularity of Back to the Future boosted the car’s popularity significantly and it would have been a complete flop for DMC otherwise.
Personal connections aside, I had a good time with this movie. It was well paced, the performances from the entire cast were fantastic and the narrative itself had a certain comedic whimsy applied to its science fiction elements. Flux capacitor sounds like sci-fi technobabble that I would hear on an episode of Star Trek, but it being powered by plutonium makes it sound silly in a way that I appreciate.
The time travel element of Back to the Future worked reasonably well. Often I find that when time travel is used as a plot device, it makes the plot annoyingly convoluted. Very few pieces of media make time travel work. Sometimes it is also used as method of deus ex machina and is generally unsatisfying. This movie keeps the time travel plot simple by keeping the focus on one thing – the formation of his parents’ relationship.
The Doc Brown character (played by Christopher Lloyd) was my favourite by far. The mad scientist vibes were off the charts. The hair, his dog named Einstein, the interface for the time machine. We love Einstein in this house. Back to the Future oozes a certain kind of 1980s scientific optimism and Doc is representative of that. Optimistic in the sense that the movie thinks that portable fusion reactors exist in the far-flung future of…2015. I wish.
Concluding Thoughts
Back to the Future was a fun watch. I am glad I finally got to see the source material for all those memes that I have seen over the years. I very much enjoyed the 80s rock and roll music in this movie, it was a bit nostalgic to hear Huey Lewis and I found myself listening to Sports again after I watched this movie. Yeah, that album still holds up.
The popularity of this movie spawned two sequels. I am not particularly interested in watching either sequel. As far as I am concerned, I don’t think the world in this movie or its characters need further expanding on and dragging it along for two more movies is going to ruin the vibes. One is enough for me.
That is all from me. See y’all in the next one.
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