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Sunday, June 1, 2025

Back In Time Watch: Back To The Future Part II (1989)




Watched:  05/30/2025
Format:  Amazon
Viewing:  Unknown
Director:  Robert Zemeckis


I have a very strange relationship less with Back To The Future and the two sequels - maybe more strange than I maybe should have for three movies I don't really care about.  I think those movies are perfectly adequate 1980's movies that were kind of an entertaining carnival ride at the time, but that was it.  Over the years, like so much of Gen-X's media from our formative years, the Back To The Future movies have been elevated and elevated in the zeitgeist until, now, they're considered a major cultural touchstone.  Which, to me, is like "what if The Wraith or Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend were the movie that generated a cottage industry for a studio, inspired rides, a West End musical, and endless devotion?"  

Like, the movie was something I enjoyed, sorta, at the time, but it wasn't my jam.

First, as a kid I found Michael J. Fox as much fun as nails on a chalkboard.  It wasn't until Spin City that I found him remotely tolerable.  And in retrospect, that was probably that Connie Britton was such a distraction I didn't notice Fox as much.  I do not wish to speak ill of Fox, but his general Michael J. Fox-ness was a major factor in my reaction to all of his movies.  Sorry, dude.

I felt like, even at the time, "oh, here's more of that Boomer nostalgia about the 1950's and 60's" which was all over at the time.  I mean, 1986 gave us Peggy Sue Got Married, and the previous years had been giving us Happy Days, Grease, Sha-na-na...   As a kid who liked sci-fi, it felt like a waste of the potential for the concept, and only later did I appreciate that time travel was just the excuse to soak in this funny premise of a kid meeting his parents at the same age.  And hear music from 97.7 - all the oldies, all the time.  

The humor in the first one struck me as dumb.  The bit about "I am Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan" just felt... lame to me. 

Anyway, I returned to school in the fall of 1985 to find my pals were all huge fans of the movie, and I was very surprised.  But I was fine with saying "y'all enjoy.  It's just not my thing."  

In the ensuing years, people have been angry with me for my middling response to Back to the Future, which is kind of funny.  You can't say "yeah, I just don't love it the way you do" without people taking it personally and, in their mind, hearing "I hate Back to the Future".  Which, I am guessing, is what you're hearing in your head right now if you love these movies.  And so it was, I really wanted to cover the phenomenon on the podcast before we shut it down.  But didn't.

But I don't hate the movies.  They're fine!  I just have things I'd rather watch.  Like The Wraith.   

I did see Back to the Future II (1989) in the theater, opening weekend when it was released, and it was fine.  I do recall finding the ending of it both really clever and also maddening.  I think I know why now, but at the time was just sort of irritated that it would resolve in a sequel I would also have to see.

Friday we watched Back To The Future II, and I'm gonna be honest - I think I'm right about it.  It's just kind of okay.  It feels as much like a vehicle for product placement as anything else - I literally can't think of a movie with as many lovingly used brand names as this movie.  Fox repeating "all I want is a Pepsi" had to have cost PepsiCo a tidy sum.*  

But it's barely a story.  After Back to the Future, the notion that we would have to see Marty save his kids made sense.  It practically wrote itself.  He'd go to high school with his kids and he'd resolve their personal problems while also dealing with himself as an adult.  Voila.  

Instead, we catch up with his loser kid getting bullied by Griff into doing a single crime, and it's not even really a story.  It's just an excuse to get Marty to Hill Valley to get the Almanac, so we get the "whoops, we messed up 1985" sequence, which is what they really wanted to do.  I don't know why they went all in on the Tannens v. McFly intergenerational conflict in this series, but they sure did.

So we get a "all in one day/ near-real-time" adventure for Marty as he goes to the future to run away from Griff for five minutes, which seems like maybe not the most effective plan, but I'm not a time-travelling scientist.  Does Doc worry about stopping Marty from making professional mistakes that will lead to his downfall?  No.  

I mean, what we do get is a kinda funny snapshot of the future as seen from 1985, which people seem to have really glommed onto over the decades.  And then the Pottersville sequence as Marty returns to the past to find Biff ruined everything.  Which means for our third act we have to go watch the first movie that we liked okay in 1985 again.  

Over the years, Zemeckis has been a huge fan of neat tricks.  He inserted Forrest Gump into historical archival footage.  He sent the Polar Express full of undead humans to the North Pole.  He made that kooky Beowulf movie.  And Back to the Future II is not so much a story as it is a series of tricks.  No one learns or grows over the course of the movie.  It's a placeholder to get Marty to the Wild West in the third installment, something no one was asking for - even if it's a decent movie (I haven't seen it in years and won't comment).  

They may also have lost Einstein and Jennifer to a timeline that no longer exists.  Like, they winked out of existence.  

Look, Lucas wrote a scene between Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan in the first Star Wars movie where he describes who Anakin was and what happened, and it sounds *amazing* and instead we got three prequels full of stuff that was in no way the cool story of a fighter pilot learning he could do the Force and being betrayed by a guy named Darth.  Which even Luke says "this is bad storytelling" in character by the third movie when they rejigger it, and by the Prequels, we toss all that out the window and Obi-Wan's story is just a lie.

So expecting Zemeckis to actually make the sequel we were promised wasn't a legal requirement.  But instead he delivers a movie where all of the lines are delivered between an 8 - 12 out of 10 in volume and energy, insisting that if we move at a rocket pace, get wow'd by the FX, brand names, and callbacks, we're having a good movie.  

What we get is an adequate movie.  It's not horrible.  But without Marty learning anything other than the very obvious perils of sports betting and time travel (and how the Heisenberg effect didn't impact the outcome of the sporting matches, I cannot guess - or that once people were onto Biff, that his money on something wouldn't mess up the odds completely), there's no story, per se.  It's a sequence of profoundly unsatisfying coincidences and missteps - the kind of stuff they now cut out of movies to get to the actual story.  It has phenomenal FX and Elizabeth Shue (who, in a moment of just lazy-as-shit-but-very-telling screen writing, is left in the literal garbage.  Well done, men-making-a-movie).  

But, Back To The Future II is not a movie, it's a carnival ride.  And as a 30 year old Mission: Impossible franchise has proven, that's a kind of movie that many people like.  And that's cool.  I am not here to say "you can't like this".  I am trying to sort out why *I* am not a fan.  

I think the fact that the ending was not actually an ending felt, in 1989 and it feels to me in 2025, like a real kick-in-the-nuts as the movie doesn't have any story.  It's mostly all set up for a denouement that will occur in a different movie.  Which, if memory serves, is wildly unsatisfying, too.  

I'll let the fact the movie loves it's callbacks/ continual threads so much, and the "no one calls me 'chicken' but is pretty dumb".

I think the weirdest thing about the movies is that Bill and Ted is still, maybe, the best handling of time travel in a major studio movie.  And that for a movie based on a time machine, the movie acts continually like there's no time machine.  

Or that all of their problems wouldn't be solved by murdering Biff Tannen.   Like... all of the problems across generations and multiple timelines.  We see that a meek Biff is still a shit.  We see that a Biff given power and money is murderous and ruinous to whole economies.  I know we shouldn't ever be cheering for a high schooler like Marty to murder, but...  I mean, technically, Biff shot first and was so out of control, his family was terrorizing Hill Valley for generations to the point he was trying to run people down in the street in full view of the public as a teen in the 1950's. 

I'm just saying.  





*This would not repeat with the band Suicidal Tendencies also stating their desire for a Pepsi


3 comments:

  1. You took this, didn't you? https://youtu.be/m6RdBMtAgSA

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. why do I feel like this is all a big lead up to a reality show or some such?

      Delete
  2. and there it is https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/gibson-searching-for-back-to-the-future-guitar-1236235897/

    ReplyDelete

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