Re-Viewing: “Back To The Future” (1985)

“Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn't take Lorraine out that he'd melt my brain.”

- George McFly (Crispin Glover)

 Hi there. When I Re-View movies I do just that, I watch them again. Catching things I missed the first time, and wondering why i did or didn’t like that movie as much as I did.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, writtten by Zemeckis and Bob Dale. This movie is famous for making Americans pronounce “gigawatt” as “jigowatt” and for avoiding a silly idea later used in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.

I was tempted to write an in-detail analysis of the temporal physics of this movie, including a clever observation on how the Time Machine itself is just about the only thing in the movie that isn’t an ontological paradox.

But really, I couldn’t reach anywhere near the level of obsession and meticulous planning found so many other places.

In stead I’m going to focus on what really got me on the re-viewing – that there were still surprises in the movie. Little ones. But still that’s what matters.

Because even after watching the movie for the nth time I’m surprised at when Marty almost speeds up to 88 on the parking lot and when the Doc’s electric wires don’t quite meet atop the clock-tower.

These may be little things sure. But that the movie can manipulate into being surprised by them once again is, I believe, a testament to it’s greatness.

Bonus Info: Having watched “Metropolis” now, I recognize Doc Brown as being modelled after the mad scientist Rotwang from that movie. But to my embarrasment, this didn’t become clear to me until the climactic clock tower scene, where Zemeckis almost goes out of his way to pay homage to “Metropolis”.