Tilbage til fremtiden
“Back to the Future” is one of the really big movies. One of
those everybody knows and many, if not most, love. I have watched it countless
times, I know all the lines, have found lots of the easter eggs and can go into
a heated discussion on timelines and paradoxes. So, yeah, I am a bit nerdy on
this one, but so are tons of people. Just look at the Wikipedia page. I do not
think even the Star Wars page is as big and detailed as this one.
If you need a plot summary for this one, I really think you
are reading the wrong blog, but very briefly: Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a
high school kid who is friends with an inventor called Dr. Emmet Brown (Christopher
Lloyd). Marty plays guitar, drives around on a skateboard and is late for school
and thus a very relatable character for teenagers. Doc Brown is this white-haired,
wild-eyed manic type that makes him the quintessential mad scientist. Also, Doc
Brown has made a time machine... out of a DeLorean.
To power the flux-capacitor (that makes time travel
possible) it needs a phenomenal amount of energy, 1.21 GW to be exact (or the
amount of power produced by 121 big offshore wind turbines on full load). Luckily
plutonium does the trick. Unluckily, the Libyan terrorists who provided the
plutonium were not so pleased with the nuclear bomb full of pinball machine
parts Doc Brown made for them and show up, pissed and all, in the middle of the
test run of the time machine. Marty McFly narrowly escapes in the DeLorean,
triggers the time machine and ends up in 1955. Can Marty find some plutonium to
get back and avoid messing up his own future?
“Back to the Future” does everything right. The premise of
the movie is interesting with plenty of opportunity for interesting adventures.
How would it be to meet your parents when they were your age? What if you
triggered the butterfly effect, changed a small thing in the past with massive
result is the future? How would you cope with life in the past or how would the
past cope if you presented it with something from the future?
The tone is comedy, but not silly or stupid comedy. We
believe in the characters and the situations all the way, something too often
forgotten in modern comedies, and both the situations and the characters are highly
amusing, if not hilariously funny. One of the famous behind-the-scenes stories tell
that filming was quite far with another actor as Marty McFly, until they
realized that he simply was not hitting that tone of comedy. Instead, they drew
in Michael J. Fox, re-shot those scenes and nailed it. Lots of scenes take
place in the night because Fox was engaged in another production during the
day.
This was a brilliant move. Fox and Lloyd have incredible chemistry,
or maybe I have just watched this so many times that I feel they belong together.
Then again, I can say that of the entire cast. Crispin Glover makes for an
amazing George McFly, Leo Thomson works convincingly as Lorraine Baines/McFly
and best of all Thomas F. Wilson is the most glorious villain, Biff. Wilson is
the nicest guy imaginable, but as Biff he is mean, brutal and incredibly low...
and hilariously funny.
The score is perfect. Alan Silvestri’s themes are now pop
culture classics, instantly recognized the world over, Huey Lewis’ “The Power
of Love” became a hit (Did you know it is himself dismissing his music as “just
too loud” in the rehearsal scene?) and several classic fifties hits play significant
parts in the story (How was it Chuck Barry came up with the sound for “Johnny B.
Goode”?).
Finally, the movie is simply exciting. It is paced well,
tense in its moments, adventurous (did I already mention that?) and not afraid
of giving us a visual spectacle, yet keeping the special effects in rein.
Great Scott! Wouldn’t I like to have a such a DeLorean?
Then I would say: “Where we are going, we don’t need roads”
