LogFAQs > #913779136

"What It Is: A story about incest.

Why It Matters: A supremely successful film of the 80s, this sits up there with mainstays of the decade such as Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters.

What I Think: For me, this movie is cartoonish, loud and ultimately empty. Back to the Future has an interesting premise that is underdeveloped and overproduced. The idea of the script is fine, but there's just no inventiveness or subtlety to anything in this film. The delicate situation of Marty's mother being tempted by Marty in the past just plays out with a faintly rancid taste. This same lack of awareness about a touchy subject plays out in the supposedly iconic scene where Marty takes the stage with a group of black musicians and a white high school. Of course, we know that small-town white folks in 1955 would never allow this to happen, and the room for social commentary between the decades is left empty. Alarmingly so. There's room here for this movie to be Pleasantville before Pleasantville or to have just a modicum of substance, but it forgoes that for the most average, thoughtless pursuit possible. At the same time, the movie focuses on extremely loud, broad, boring characters. Michael J. Fox has always been best used as a bad guy or quasi-bad guy; his charm works best when it pits itself against the viewer's rational understanding of a character. Spin City featured a slightly more cutthroat Michael J. Fox; The Good Wife understood that he should be a villain; Curb Your Enthusiasm topped them all with the most dickish behavior. Here, Marty's selfish pursuit of repairing his life is just not aided by a lack of awareness that Fox is at his best with a little bit of larceny. We're forced to rely on the stakes presented in the plot to believe he's a hero (despite his incapability of adequately dealing with incest-like behavior). There is, unfortunately, never a second's doubt that he'll manage any of these feats. The movie goes to great lengths to have the ever-cartoonish Christopher Lloyd shout loudly (apparently this is acting) a very simple plan that makes the Mark Wahlberg Italian Job heist look like the solution to a Gordian knot and then just let it play out slowly and without any real suspense. The outcome of the film ultimately is just hollow and sort of materialistic, and it's never buttressed along the way with anything of depth or nuance. It's a movie for stupid people. Or children. And that's the same thing, really." ~scarlet
---

"It is too easy being monsters. Let us try to be human." ~Victor Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful