It has been consistently voted the best film of the 1980s and plays to excited and packed crowds whenever it shows in repertory cinema, but it’s easy to forget that BACK TO THE FUTURE was one of the more unassuming film releases of 1985.
Before the advent of social media, BACK TO THE FUTURE’s first release was limited to the North American and Canadian market when it bowed amongst other key releases at the time like RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, which was one of two releases that made Sylvester Stallone the undisputed box-office champion of 1985.
Robert Zemeckis was riding high on the success the previous year of ROMANCING THE STONE and this movie was a major boost for his career in a filmography that also subsequently included the likes of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? and FORREST GUMP.
Co-written with Bob Gale – and based on the idea of whether or not they would have been friends with their own parents when they went to high school, BACK TO THE FUTURE is the tale of Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) a slacker at high school in 1985 Hill Valley (incidentally the same town square set in the film was used in GREMLINS (1984) who has a loving girlfriend, Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells), but a ne’er-do-well family.
His father George (Crispin Glover) has his old high school foe Biff (Thomas F Wilson) as his boss and his mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) drinks herself because of the fact that one of her sons has not made bail at prison.
The only bright light in Marty’s life is Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) who is an inventor. His latest device is a DeLorean Time Machine which he intends to go and visit the future, using plutonium nabbed from a bunch of Libyan terrorists he has conned by building a fake bomb out of used machine parts.
On the night of the test for the future, the terrorists turn up as Doc and Marty are recording the first results and shoot Doc dead. Marty escapes in the car, but on hitting eighty-eight miles per hour and due to Doc inputting a date from 1955, Marty ends up three decades before, where he encounters a different world, with the same people from his present.
Complications become even more so when whilst saving his father from being hit by a car, he is taken into a certain Lorraine Baines house – his future mother, who takes a shine to him….
One of the cleverest screenplays of all time and a deserved blockbuster experience, BACK TO THE FUTURE is among the gold-dust of time travel yarns, with instantly quotable lines and a movie that when it first was released generated some many rounds of applause. The fact that it still carries the same impact today is the mark of any true classic film.
A pair of simultaneously-shot sequels, PART II and PART III followed in 1989 and 1990, playfully playing with the concepts of the future and past. PART III was cheerful play on the Western Genre.