Sequel Saturday: Back to Back to the Future, by Mat Bradley-Tschirgi

iTunes Movie Trailers just premiered the trailer for Back in Time, an upcoming documentary on the Back to the Future trilogy featuring brand new interviews with the cast and crew coming to theaters October 21^st, 2015. Let’s take a look back at this classic trilogy with a trio of capsule reviews.

Back to the Future: It’s hard to top the original Back to the Future. I remember my family purchasing a copy of it on VHS when McDonald’s was having a weird movie promotion in the early 1990s. The best performances in the film (Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson are real standouts as Doc Brown and Lorraine McFly) mix cartoonish enthusiasm with a dollop of sincerity. A film with comedy and romance mixed a science-fiction scenario shouldn’t work this well.

Back to the Future part II: Although the original Back to the Future was a time travel movie, its plot was pretty straightforward. Back to the Future Part II revels in making things as complicated as possible. Heroes and villains time travel into the future and the past to prevent Biff Tannen (an underrated Thomas F. Wilson) from changing the past with an almanac from the future. The future sequences in 2015 (!!) look cornier now than they did at the time of the film’s original release, and the overall tone is much darker than the original. Back to the Future Part II tries too hard while giving the audience too little.   

Back to the Future part III: After an opening sequence that takes far too long to get going, Back to the Future Part III really gets going once it settles into its Wild West setting. Christopher Lloyd has a blast playing Doc Brown yet again; this time he gets a romantic subplot with Mary Steenburgen playing Clara. Sure, things tie up a bit too neatly and it feels like less it at stake than in the prior two films. However, the flick is good-natured like the original and brings the fun back to the series.