Back to the Future (1985)

The premise

It's 1985 in Hill Valley, California. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a teenager who plays guitar in a band and has a family he'd rather not turn into. His father, George (Crispin Glover), is timid and gets bullied, and his mother, Lorraine (Lea Thompson), is unhappy. The adult Marty actually likes spending time with is Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown (Christopher Lloyd), an eccentric scientist who has turned a DeLorean sports car into a time machine.

Doc's demonstration goes wrong, and Marty ends up alone in the car, 30 years back, in 1955. He meets his parents as teenagers and gets in the way of the moment they were supposed to fall in love. If they don't get together, he won't be born. So he has two jobs: play matchmaker for his own mom and dad, and talk the 1955 Doc Brown into helping him get the machine running again so he can go home.

How it handles time

The machine comes with a short list of rules, and the script teaches them to you like a user manual. The car has to hit 88 miles per hour. It needs 1.21 gigawatts of power, which the film pronounces "jigowatts" (the script spells it that way too). The flux capacitor, a Y-shaped box of flashing tubes, is what makes the jump possible, and Doc proves it works by sending his dog, Einstein, one minute into the future by remote control. In 1985 the power comes from plutonium Doc swindled from a group of Libyan terrorists. In 1955 there's no plutonium to be had, and finding 1.21 gigawatts some other way is what the whole back half of the film turns on.

That 88 was chosen to stick in your head: it was easy to remember and looked cool on the speedometer. The filmmakers even had to build a custom speedometer, because a 1979 US rule had capped them at 85 mph.

The bigger rule is the one Gale and Zemeckis set out to break. They felt many time-travel movies treated the past as fixed, so here it isn't: whatever Marty does in 1955 changes the 1985 he left. The film puts that on screen with a family photo Marty carries, which slowly changes as his future gets less likely. It's a simple, very visual ticking clock.

It also doesn't hold up if you poke it, and Gale is the first to say so. In a 2015 interview with The Hundreds, he called the photo "movie logic," asked out loud why the paper itself doesn't disintegrate, and said, "If you really think about this stuff, it makes absolutely no sense at all." In the FAQ on the official site, the writers answer other fan puzzles with several possible explanations, including a "self preservation" instinct in the space-time continuum. I don't mind any of it. The rules the film actually states (the speed, the power, a past you can change) never break. The ones it quietly bends are the ones it never explains.

What works

The script is the star. Zemeckis and Gale fill the 1985 scenes with details that matter once Marty lands in 1955. The time circuits show November 5, 1955, the day Doc slipped while hanging a clock, hit his head, and came up with the flux capacitor. James Tolkan plays Mr. Strickland, the school principal in both 1985 and 1955, a joke the film never stops to explain. Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) gets the same treatment: he's George's boss in 1985 and his bully in 1955, so by the time you meet the younger Biff, you already know how that story went the first time.

Christopher Lloyd's Doc is the performance everyone remembers. Kirk Ellis wrote in The Hollywood Reporter in 1985 that Lloyd "redefine[d] the mad scientist for modern movie audiences," and four decades later I still can't name a screen scientist who replaced him. Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover have the harder job, playing Marty's parents as teenagers and again 30 years later, and both versions feel like the same two people.

Fox is the glue, and the story behind his casting makes his ease even more impressive. Eric Stoltz was the original Marty and was let go weeks into filming. Fox took over in January 1985 and then shot Family Ties by day and this film by night until April.

The music carries a lot of the film too. Alan Silvestri's score is as recognizable as the DeLorean, and Huey Lewis and the News' "The Power of Love" went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Huey Lewis also turns up, uncredited, as a Battle of the Bands judge.

What doesn't

The Libyan terrorists are the one part that has aged badly. They're there to explain the plutonium and to make the demonstration go wrong, and even in 1985 some reviewers found them in poor taste. Today they play as a lazy stereotype in a film that's otherwise careful with its details.

Not everyone was charmed at the time, either. Sheila Benson called it "big, cartoonish, and empty" in the Los Angeles Times. I disagree with "empty," but "cartoonish" fits Biff's gang: Skinhead, 3-D, and Match (a very young Billy Zane) are there to shove people, not to be characters. The ending has its critics as well, Crispin Glover among them. I get into that in the spoiler section below.

Final score

Overall: 10/10. It's the reference point for time-travel comedy, and I can't find a scene that doesn't earn its place.

Paradox Meter: 3/5. The rules it spells out hold firm, but the photo and who remembers what only work if you don't push too hard, and the writers say so themselves.

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• Back to the Future Part II (1989): the direct sequel, shot back to back with Part III. (not on the site yet)
• Back to the Future Part III (1990): the one that closes the trilogy. (not on the site yet)
• The Time Machine (1960): the film nods to it, down to the colors on the DeLorean's time display. (not on the site yet)
• It's a Wonderful Life (1946): some 1985 critics made the comparison, since both follow a hero whose future changes. (not on the site yet)
• Time Bandits (1981): one of the time-travel flops studios pointed to when they turned this script down. (not on the site yet)