(courtesy IMP Awards)
Sticking classic movies back in the cinema has become quite the cinematic catnip for those of us who saw the originals way back in the day when they weren’t confined solely to small streaming screens and home theatre systems.
While we’ve all become accustomed, for better or worse, to seeing these films on screens so small we can hold them in the palm of our hand, there’s something luxuriously immersive about watching them back in their native habitat where they can be screened exactly as they weren’t meant to be seen.
The latest recipient of this nostalgia-meets-teeny-tiny-digital-screen-antidote screening trend is Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis, which managed that impressive feat of being wildly imaginative while hitting the heart right where it most affects you.
The two don’t always sit cheek-by-jowl but Back to the Future managed it with giddy aplomb, a time travel film that was as fun as it was tense and which packs a lot into an economical running time of less than two hours.
Quite apart from the treat of watching it on the big screen, what made watching it again after far too long a gap is being reminded just brilliantly it tells its story.
Penned by Zemeckis and Bob Gale, Back to the Future does a superb job of packing a lot of narrative ground into a tight running time that weaves in exposition with the economy and grace and which keeps things moving along with wit and moving moments while allowing some genuinely touching moments to unfold.
The genius of the film is that it manages to keep things moving without ever making you feel like you don’t have time to appreciate what’s going on, and there is, if you’re paying attention, a LOT going on.
Set in the amusingly named town of Hill Valley, Back to the Future centres on Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox at the height of his ’80s fame) a handsome high schooler with a beautifully girlfriend, Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells) who has aspirations to play guitar in a band and make a success of his life unlike his much put-upon father George (Crispin Glover) who is still bullied by his high school nemesis Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) who is now his lazy, nasty supervisor at work (well, it is a small town, after all).
Marty’s family live in Lyon Estates, a once visionary suburban estate, as we see in the ads for the new urban settlement when Marty is whisked back to 1955 (more on that later), their lives dull facsimiles of what they no doubt envisaged for themselves – Marty’s mum Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is a wistful alcoholic in an empty marriage and his two siblings are working menial jobs that are clearly going nowhere.
Jennifer and his music aside – which we know will go nowhere without serious intervention because Marty’s whole family is trapped by George’s surrender to the nothingness of an unambitious life – the one ray of light in Marty’s life is Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), an eccentric inventor who has spent decades trying to perfect a time travel device, the schematics of which came to him one night when he fell off the toilet.
He’s been unsuccessful to date, and squandered his entire family fortune in the process, but after he phones Marty asking him to meet him at 1.15am at the local Twin Pines Motel, it emerges he’s not only mastered the Flux Capacitor needed to make time travel possible but he’s crammed it into a DeLorean, a sleek, very ’80s car that absolutely is what you’d choose if you wanted to whoosh through time and look super cool doing it.
Marty and Doc meet, things happen including a fairly traumatic moment that must be left in the realm of spoilers that should not be shared, even after forty years, and suddenly Marty, there only to document Doc’s experiments in time travel with his dog Einstein, is hurtled back to 1955 where he has to find a younger Doc and convince him to help him to 1985.
It’s a relatively simply story but then all the best stories are.
Back to the Future‘s greatest achievement is taking this straightforward story and filling it with moments of real buoyant humour – manure filling a classic car, and a bully bested to boot? Yes please! – thrilling tension as Marty tries to desperately to get home with his family intact and the kind of heart-on-sleeve moments that ’80s movies seemed to excel at.
It’s also a fun romp through the possibilities and fun of time travel and it’s here that many of the film’s best scenes find expression.
Whether it’s tension-filled moments at the mall in 1985 or in the town square in 1955 where Marty’s only hope of return is to harness a known lightning strike for the power he needs to return home – this scene is so artfully done that even though you know it will end in success, complication after complication keep you, pretyy much literally, on the edge of your seat – or fun-filled riffing on the “butterfly effect” where, for instance, Twin Pine Mall becomes Lone Pine Mall when Marty gets back to the ’80s, Back to the Future takes the idea of travelling through time and uses it to great comedic and dramatic effect.
The film also carries with it a theme of reinvention and renewal with Marty’s trip back to 1955 changing the timeline for the better – quite how should be left the final scenes but it’s moving and fun all in one – which gives it some emotional resonance in amongst all the avuncular romping through time.
The great part about watching Back to the Future after so long, and happily on the big screen, is that you can fully appreciate once again what a clever, flawlessly put together piece of cinema it is, funny and moving, adventuresome and tension-filled all in one and proof that getting thrown back thirty years in time, especially if you have a lovably mad scientist at your disposal, is not the worst thing that could happen you.