It was the year that I turned eight years old. I was in the third grade. I had developed a fascination with reading. I read every book that I could get my hands on. My town’s public library was one of my favorite places, followed closely by my school library. And not only had I discovered a love of reading, but I had also discovered a love of science fiction.
One of my favorite books of that time was a “choose your own adventure” story. You would read the first couple of pages of the book and you would make a choice. The page that you read next would depend on your choice. It was great because you could go back and make different decisions and have a whole new story. This particular story had to do with time travel. I thought that the concept of traveling to the past or the distant future was intriguing. I used to run around in the woods behind my house pretending I had been transported to a prehistoric time when dinosaurs still lurked around every corner.
It should be no surprise to anyone who knows me that the movie from 1985 that affected me most was Back To The Future.
It was a classic and unexplainable trope in some of the old goofy sci-fi stories that a teenage boy would be friends with some crazy old inventor usually called “Doctor” or “Professor”. It was a way to have a story for kids about someone their age having an adventure with technology that they couldn’t have created on their own. The Professor made the shrink ray or the clone maker. In this case, the Doc made the time machine.
Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, is friends with Doc Brown who created a time machine out of a DeLorean. The Doc’s machine runs off of plutonium, which he stole from some Libyan terrorists. They track him down as he’s showing off his invention. The Doc gets killed, and Marty jumps into the DeLorean to get away, accidentally sending himself back in time 30 years to the year 1955.
Once he’s there, he finds that his presence has disrupted history from occurring the way it should and that his existence in the future is in jeopardy. So, he gets Doc’s younger self to help him solve the problem and send him back…to the future.
I get worked up just thinking about this movie. The premise is a little goofy. Yeah, it’s weird for a 17-year-old kid to be friends with a man in his sixties or seventies, but it works to get us to the part of the story set in the 50s.
If there is one thing that this movie gets right, it’s the feel of the 50s. You can almost believe that Marty went there. The clothes, the music, the colors, the advertisements…all of it is there to create a sense of nostalgia. This movie wasn’t made for me. This movie was made for parents and people just a little older than them. My mom was born on November 25, 1955, which is just a couple of weeks after the timeline of the movie. People that were a little older than that would remember this time from when they were kids. That’s who they were shooting for.
Even though it has its roots in science-fiction and has a few scenes with special effects, it’s a pretty small film. Once Marty is transported to 1955, the movie depends on the story and the characters to carry it, and not on special effects or CGI. And the characters delivered. Crispin Glover is a weird guy and no one else could have played the role of George McFly. He was a coward that Marty helped to find his backbone. He not only ensured that he and Lorraine (Lea Thompson) would get married, but he made their future better. Thompson was great as Marty’s mom, even though it was creepy that she tries to “get with” Marty….**shiver**.
And who can forget Thomas F. Wilson as the big bully, Biff Tannen? Everyone has known a Biff in their life. He’s the guy that thinks he’s the greatest at everything, but he’s just a tiny weasel in a big suit.
Fox and Lloyd hold this movie together. Even though there was an age difference, they are one of the best comedy duos of all time. They have a chemistry between them that worked not only in this film but was the best part of the two sequels that came later. It seems so strange to find out that Fox almost didn’t play Marty. Eric Stoltz was originally cast because Fox was busy making Family Ties. They nearly filmed the entire movie with Stoltz in the lead but just realized that the chemistry wasn’t there, and the movie wasn’t working. They were able to work out a deal with NBC to get Fox at night and on the weekends. They reshot almost the whole film. If that had not happened, then this series would not be the well-loved classic that it is today.
I quote this movie so much it’s accepted by my family as part of my dialogue. How many times have I gotten into a car and said “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”? It’s a number that is too high to attain. “This is heavy” is a staple of mine as well.
And, yes, the paradox stuff doesn’t quite work out. We know that if you changed history and it was something that caused you to not exist that it would be pretty instantaneous. You wouldn’t watch a picture of your family slowly fade and then see your fingers and hand disappear. But this is a family comedy, not a straight-up sci-fi film, so it works.
So today I’d have to say that Back To The Future is not only my favorite time travel movie of all time, but it is the most defining movie for me that came from 1985.
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