Welcome back to another SPOILERTASTIC edition of Geek Movie Reviews. Warning: the following review contains heavy spoilers of a 1980’s movie that you should have already seen. PixelatedGeek.com is not liable for any spoilers you may be exposed to during the course of this article.

Meet Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox), your regular 17 year-old high school student. He has ambitions of becoming a musician, has a girlfriend who absolutely loves him, and a family he’s not particularly proud of. Life is pretty normal for Marty, except for the fact that he spends his time with an aging inventor, Dr. Emmett Brown (played by Christopher Lloyd, a scientist who Marty affectionately calls “Doc” and whose life’s work revolves around time travel. So, after a late-night meeting with Doc, in which he unveils his latest invention, a time machine built into a DeLorean DMC-12. And, after an altercation with Libyan terrorists (that’s right, terrorists), who Doc swindled in order to get a hold of the plutonium necessary to power the time machine, Doc is murdered and Marty drives away in the DeLorean, unintentionally activating the time circuits and blasting him back to November 5, 1955. Upon arriving in 1955, Marty meets his parents in their younger days and interrupts a pivotal event in their courtship, causing a chain reaction, which will cause Marty to disappear from existence. Unable to return to the present, due to his current predicament and the fact that he left behind the case of plutonium necessary to power the time circuits, Marty enlists the help of a younger Doc Brown, who plans to use the energy of a bolt of lightning set to strike the Hill Valley clock tower on November 12th to send Marty back to 1985.

More of this time-bending review after the break.

Presenting...the DeLorean!

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and Produced by Steven Spielberg, Back to the Future, released July 3, 1985, became an instant classic, continuously topping charts to this day. Coming in as the #10 Science-Fiction film of all time in the American Film Institute’s 10 Top 10, ranking the 10 top films in 10 separate genre’s and having been selected for preservation in the Nation Film Registry (there seems to be a pattern developing with these reviews), the film tells an excellent story about a teenager finding himself in a world he knows very little about meeting a younger version of his parents, who he also really knows very little about as well. Throughout the course of the film, Marty, whose mother has developed a crush on him after her father hit him with his car (in the original timeline, Marty’s father, George McFly was the one hit by the car after he fell from a tree while peeking into his future wife’s window with a pair of binoculars), attempts to coach his father, a major dork who is constantly bullied by Biff Tannen, in how to talk to his mother, Lorraine Baines in order to repair the damage done to the timeline. However, every attempt seems to end with Marty accidently upstaging his father, making his mother even more interested in him. As he begins to spend more time with his father, he begins to figure things out about him, and his mother as well, who appears to betray the “good girl” image that Marty always expected from her. At one point in the present, she criticizes present day girls for chasing after boys, only for Marty to find her doing the exact same things she claimed to never do when she was young.

"1.21 Jigowatts?!?!" The 1955 version of Doc Brown realizes just how impossible sending Marty back to 1985 seems.

The film also showcases an excellent relationship between Marty and both 1955 and 1985 incarnations of Doc Brown. The rapport between the two characters is exquisite and Marty is seen to genuinely care about Doc, especially after attempting to tell him about his ultimate fate on October 26, 1985, something that Doc continuously refuses to listen to, afraid of altering his own future just as Marty had done. Some of the finer points of the relationship happen with the 1955 version of Doc Brown, who tends to misconstrue some the expressions Marty uses with hilarious results. A personal favorite happens with Marty’s initial use of the term “This is heavy,” meant to mean that this situation is pretty serious, to which Doc replies “Weight has nothing to do with it.”

The actors play their parts well. We see a lot of chemistry between Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, whose interactions throughout the film range from hilarious to heart warming. Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson, who play George McFly and Lorraine Baines McFly respectively, are also great, with Glover’s rendition of George being that of a very nervous, socially challenged dork who secretly writes Sci-Fi stories. Thompson’s portrayal of Lorraine is quite comical, spending most of the film acting like a love-sick puppy, eager to get into her future son’s pants (as disturbing as that sounds). She also does a very good job of contrasting her younger self with her older self, who appears as a miserable alcoholic who, judging by the look on her face as she recounts how she and George fell in love, appears to regret her decision to marry her husband. Finally, rounding out the cast as the extremely unlikeable bully, Biff Tannen, is Thomas F. Wilson, who plays Biff so well, you’ll want to reach into your TV and punch him in the face for being such a complete and utter ass.

While Marty is the main character, the film itself largely revolves around the characters of George and Lorraine, and we as viewers are basically placed in Marty’s shoes, being shown just how big of losers the two of them are in the present. Seeing Marty’s parents, both in the present and in the past, helps to explain Marty’s character, especially when we see his father as an almost mirror of himself (Marty’s an aspiring musician who’s afraid of being rejected and his father writes sci-fi stories but is to afraid to show them to anyone). In that respect, the movie is also an underdog story, as we, the audience cheer when George wins over Lorraine and when Marty rocks out on stage at his parents’ school dance, apparently inventing Rock n’ Roll in the process. In contrast to something like Blade Runner, a happy ending works for Back to the Future, as it is heart warming to see Marty finally return to his time to find that his family is all the better thanks to his actions, and for accidently putting his father in a situation where he was forced to stand up to Biff to save, and subsequently win over, Lorraine.

Doc Brown returns from visiting 2015 in the film's finale.

Regardless of how many years it has been since the film was first released, Back to the Future remains a classic, and is personally one of my favorite films of all time. The entire Back to the Future series itself is incredible in my book, so stay tuned next week when Geek Movie Reviews brings you Back to the Future, Part II.

Fun Facts:
Back to the Future was not originally intended to have a sequel. The ending in which Doc Brown comes back from the future to take Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer back with him was intended to be nothing more than one final gag for the film. Had Director and co-writer Robert Zemeckis known that the film would have warranted a sequel, he would have never had the movie end with Marty and Doc going into the future as he felt most movies always have the future highly misrepresented.

The original version of the time machine was that of a converted refrigerator, which was changed out of fear that kids would see the film and climb into their own refrigerators in an attempt to travel through time.

When originally pitching the idea, Zemeckis went to Disney, who told him the idea of a mother falling in love with her son too risqué for them. Other studios didn’t want to option the film either, but because it wasn’t risqué enough.

Before the lightning strike at the clock tower was decided for the film’s climax, one version of the script had Marty drive the DeLorean onto an atomic bomb testing range, using the power of a nuclear explosion to power the DeLorean. In the revised version, lightning was chosen because Doc explained that plutonium was used to generate 1.21 jigowatts (actually gigawatts) of electricity necessary to power the Flux Capacitor.

Musician Huey Lewis, who’s band provided music for the film, can be seen at the beginning as judge who tells Marty’s band that they’re “too darn loud” to play at the high school dance. The song Marty’s band plays is Huey Lewis’ The Power of Love.