[Nerdspresso] How Back to the Future Saved My Love for Cinema

I was 16 years old when I fell out of love with movies. It was the summer of 1985. I was flipping burgers at McDonald’s to earn some spending cash and put gas in my Honda Scooter. In between making Big Macs, I ventured to the movies and the comic book shop. Over a couple of weeks, I saw both Cocoon and A View to a Kill as the harbingers of the summer movie season. In hindsight, they’re not bad movies, but teenage me was not impressed.

Cocoon was kind of slow and the old people were cute, but it wasn’t my vibe. A View to a Kill had an awesome opening song, but Roger Moore as James Bond was getting long in the tooth. He looked silly battling Grace Jones and romancing Tanya Roberts. The only person in that movie having any fun was Christopher Walken as a villainous French industrialist. These flicks just didn’t light me up. I wasn’t welcomed by their celluloid embrace.

At the time, I thought: “Maybe I just don’t like movies anymore.” I realize now that I was just in the wrong movies. Maybe I was being a little ageist. I couldn’t grasp the full power of Wilford Brimley, who was younger when he made Cocoon than I am now (Yikes!). Movies had always been a great escape up to that point. My parents didn’t take me to the movies often, so they had this mystique. The theater was a sanctuary. Every movie was an adventure. Not enjoying them had me really bummed.

Later that summer, a friend suggested we check out this new comedy produced by Steven Spielberg. It was about time travel starring that preppy kid from Family Ties. I was hesitant. I didn’t want to be disappointed again. This Michael J. Fox guy was entertaining as a proto yuppie on a sitcom, but could he be a movie star?

He was sharing the screen with Reverend Jim from Taxi, who was playing a mad scientist. A year before, this guy was a Klingon in Star Trek III so obviously he had range, but what was a teenager doing hanging out with a wacky inventor? It was kind of creepy. My buddy convinced me to go with him to the AMC Interstate Six to check it out.

I was reluctant, but at the end of the day, I was still a suburban teenager and it was summer. It was 1985. If I wasn’t assembling Happy Meals or hanging out at the mall, what else was I going to do? I couldn’t skateboard or break dance so my options were pretty limited. Plus, my pal said he’d go halfsies on a large popcorn. Concessions were my weakness.

We bought our snacks and settled into our seats in Theater No. 4. The lights dimmed and the movie started. The first titles appeared under the tinkling strains of Alan Silvestri’s score. Then there was a slow pan of all kinds of clocks, followed by some Rube Goldbergian moments and all kinds of visual clues to Doc Brown’s past (which teenage me pretty much ignored because…you know, popcorn), and then in walks Michael J as Marty McFly.

He gets ready to play his tiny guitar in front of the biggest speaker I’d ever seen. Marty cranks up the amplifier and plays the first chord and CRAAAAAASH! Some monster sound waves throw him against the wall, wrecking the place. Suddenly, he gets a phone call (on a landline!) from his scientist pal. Doc Brown needs help with his latest experiment so Marty needs to meet him later at the mall parking lot. Just then all the clocks go off at once and Marty realizes that he’s late for school. Cue Huey Lewis and the News!

It was the nerdy pop grooves of Huey Lewis that reeled me in. I was a pretty big fan back in the day and this was a brand new song that he did just for this flick! Things were looking up. Marty hitched a ride by grabbing the bumper of a car that pulled him on his skateboard around the town of Hill Valley. I wasn’t astute enough to realize that I’d seen this setting a year earlier when it was used as the hometown in Gremlins. I wasn’t a super movie nerd yet, but I was definitely all in on this flick. Back to the Future made me love movies again.

Granted, it had only been a trial separation, but this flick restored my faith in Hollywood. Back to the Future is snappy and fun, which is what you want from your summer movies. It’s a joyful escape from the everyday. This film celebrates four decades of time travel and Oedipal hijinks this summer. Great Scott!

I’ve seen it so many times now but I still remember what a blast I had watching it for the very first time. Every scene was a new discovery as you were transported by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s masterful script and Fox’s guileless performance as Marty McFly. He plays a precocious teen frustrated by his sad-sack parents who (he thinks) have no understanding of what it’s like to be him. Then he uses his friend’s time machine (built into a DeLorean, which was kind of like the Cybertruck of the ’80’s) to go back to his hometown in 1955.

While there, he meets his parents as teens and realizes that they’re not so different after all. He also inadvertently prevents them from falling in love, putting his own existence in jeopardy. And his Mom gets the hots for him. Whoa, that’s heavy! The first half of the movie drops Marty into a puzzle and he spends the second half trying to solve it. He’s aided by Doc’s younger self and together they figure out how to send Marty back to the future.

Co-writer Zemeckis also directed the movie, which was his follow-up to Romancing the Stone – another classic that’s worth seeing again. Back in his day, this guy made some really fun movies. A Spielberg protege, Zemeckis has emerged as one of the most successsful filmmakers of the last four decades. He has creating some truly dazzling popular entertainment like Forrest Gump, Contact, Death Becomes Her, and What Lies Beneath.

He’s also the guy behind such ostentatiously obtuse efforts as The Polar Express, Beowulf, Welcome to Marwen, and Here. But Back to the Future is prime Zemeckis. Before he became so obsessed with technology that it bogged down his storytelling. Go back and watch Back to the Future again and enjoy its brisk, bright narrative. You don’t need to watch the sequels.

The sequels are fun, but after a while your brain gets tired from all the actors playing multiple roles and the throwbacks to the original film. Back to the Future plays best on its own. There’s not a single wrong note. The cast, the story, the music, everything just clicks. You don’t need to entertain thoughts about sequels or remakes or speculating what if they made the movie today and Marty went back to 1995. That’s just crazy talk.

This one is fine just how it is. Rent Back to the Future now on Prime or Apple TV to savor this time capsule for yourself. It is one of the ultimate teen movies of the ‘80s. That’s not because it was so successful (which it was), and not because it’s an accurate depiction of ’80’s teenage life (which it’s not unless you’re a twentysomething movie teen).

For me, this movie captures what it felt like to be a teen back in the summer of 1985. It just pulsates with the joyous buzz of youth.