Back to the Future Part II

Welcome back everyone to my review on the epic “Back to the Future Trilogy,” where today we will be looking at “Back to the Future Part II,” released in 1989. This movie is an exercise in silliness, a tour into various versions of the past and future that is so mysterious that even the characters are constantly trying to explain it to each other. Roger Ebert even admitted, “I should have brought a big yellow legal pad to the screening, so I could take detailed notes just to keep the time-lines straight.” However, the movie is fun, mostly because it’s so crazy.

Any story that has time travel involves the possibility of ironies, which have provided science-fiction writers with plots for years. Let’s ask what would happen if you killed your grandfather? What do you say if you meet yourself? Ebert even said, “In one famous s-f story, a time traveler to the distant past steps on a single bug and wipes out all the life forms of the future.”

“Back to the Future Part II” is the story of how the protagonists of the first movie, Marty McFly and Doc Brown, try to control time without creating ironies, and how they accidentally create an entirely different future – one where Marty’s mother is actually married to his at fault enemy, Biff Tannen, reprised by Thomas F. Wilson. McFly and Brown are played again this time by Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, the stars of the first movie, which was a box-office hit, and they not only made “Part II” but went ahead and filmed “Part III” at the same time. Actually, this movie closed with a coming-soon trailer for the third movie, which was released the next year. (Ebert said, “Trivia buffs may note that Russ Meyer is the only other filmmaker to end a movie with a trailer.”) The script talks on the set of this movie must have been entirely confusing, as director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale tried to find their way through the maze they had created. The movie starts in 1985. Marty has just return from his travel to 1955 when Doc Brown appears once again in his famous De Lorean. He’s breathless with importance and wants Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer, played by Elisabeth Shue, to join him on his time travel to this year, where absolutely everything has gone wrong and Marty is needed to save his own son from going to prison.

Ebert said, “The city of Hill Valley in the year 2015 looks like the cover of an old pulp magazine.” The town square we remember from the previous film has changed into ramps heading for the skies and jet-powered vehicles flying through the skies. The kids even have skateboards that operate on the same principle as hovercraft, which leads to one of the movie’s best special-effects moments when McFly tries to avoid Biff’s grandson, Griff’s, also played by Wilson, gang.

He more or less accomplishes his mission this year, but makes the mistake of buying a sports almanac that has all of the scores from the years 1950 to 2000 in it. The almanac and the De Lorean are stolen by Biff, who travels back in time to give the almanac to himself, so that he can place every winning bet and become a billionaire.

In the process, Hill Valley in 1985 turns into a purgatory ruled over by the evil billionaire who created this scheme, and so Marty and Doc travel back to 1955 to try and get the almanac back from Biff. If you are able to keep up with this entire plot, you are very intelligent. Ebert even said, “I won't even begin to try to explain the ways in which the various parents and children of the main characters get involved in the story, or what happens when McFly very nearly attends a high school dance on a double date with himself, or how Fox plays three roles, including his own daughter.”

What’s entertaining about “Back to the Future Part II” is the way Christopher Lloyd plays Doc, where he nervously tries to figure out what’s happening as he flies through time trying to fix everything back to the way it was. The mistake in Doc’s reasoning, obviously, is his guess that he knows which is the correct timeline that should be fixed. Ebert asks, “How does he know that the "real world" of the first movie was not itself an alternate time-line? It's a job for God.”

“Part II,” for all of its insanity, lacks the true power of the original. The story of the 1985 film has real heart to it: If Marty didn’t travel from 1985 to 1955 and organize for his parents to have their first date; he might not even be born. The time travel in that film involved his own emotional conflict with his parents as teenagers. “Part II,” on the other hand, is mostly just madness and eccentric jokes. However, it’s fun on that level.

In the end, if you liked the first one, then you will definitely like the second. It’s a very good movie, and another one of my favorites, despite the fact that it kind of does a revisit to the first movie, but in a way, that shows how connected it is. I can understand why people say the sequels keep stepping down, but I still feel all of them are very good, entertaining movies that are worth checking out because all of them are just as good and are worth checking out. This movie probably got some stuff right with how 2015 was going to look, but not everything is here. Maybe give it some time and everything portrayed in this movie might come out sooner than we think.

How is the third movie, you ask? I might have given a little foreshadowing, but you’ll just have to wait until next week to find out for yourselves.