Re-evalutating Back to the Future (Part I - III)--the power of ending well

 After the commercial success of Romancing the Stone, Robert Zemeckis was able to create Back to the Future, reaping in what comes to, according the Inflation calculator, nearly a billion in sales in today's dollars. He was initially unable to find a studio, shopping it around to forty, none of which were interested in his humor. 

My initial viewing of the first film was bedazzlement. I don't recall laughing, but its zany, light-hearted tone was a definite draw. The "humor" won't make someone laugh out loud over goofy clocks or a Rube-Goldberg device. Certainly, it'd been done before. However, it is amazing to watch such an elaborate construction burn toast and open a can--or similar mundane tasks. The draw isn't realism, either. What inventor ever constructed an elaborate device to execute a mundane task? Doing so requires far more work than doing the simple task itself. Yet its elaborateness is simple enough that we buy into it. 

The pouring of dogfood with a worryingly absent dog, missing plutonium that ends up under the bed (revealed by a skateboard), and hitching rides on a skateboard while late for school are nice touches, but not particularly hilarious. They do set up the mood of the film. They suggest inventiveness, resourcefulness, and a touch of danger.

If we drilled down very far, we'd expose the lack of realism, but it's just enough realism we buy into it and we're shown not to take any of it too seriously. Later, the main body of the film becomes a vehicle for nostalgia for one generation to explore its parent's generation. It's an intriguing recipe for success.

But what happened to the next films? We go from an 8.5 on IMDB to 7.8 to a 7.4, from $1 billion to $0.8 to $0.5 (Rotten Tomatoes, my least favorite indicator, goes from 96 to 66 to 80). The second film in ways is far more inventive--not only in painting the future but also in playing with time. It is perhaps somewhat less believable, but the established tone prevents this from being a problem. When I was a kid, my problem was outrage that it wasn't a complete film, that I'd paid money for an incomplete experience.  

The final film completed the experience and returned a little more believability, but the inventiveness dropped way down. My first viewing as a kid was that it was an excuse to make a mediocre western. My feeling as a kid might have ranked them as IMDB and the money seem to indicate.

Viewing the films as separate entities, my initial critique of the films stands up. However, as a series, the critiques miss the mark. As I discussed earlier regarding the Alien movie franchise, a series hitches movies together as a team, so that it averages out deficiencies--so long as one of the films isn't DOA. 

Viewing them as a series, my estimation of the films changes. Given the above, you'd conclude that if you only watched one, it should be the first. However, my rewatch inverted my favorites. My new favorite is the last. Mostly, it is because Doc Brown has become, in some sense, the protagonist, and Marty is not just trying to get home but also aiding his friend to find home and/or love without time paradoxes. This increases our affection for both characters and deepens their characterization, albeit not profoundly. Also, gratefully, there's no moment at the end where it suggests we should watch the next movie. Instead, it is a fulfillment of all protagonists and all films with a final vision of wonder.

Sadly, the second, despite its frenetic and pleasurable inventiveness, lags far behind the other two. It seems the filmmakers didn't take time to leave its viewers at a moment where they can assess the events they'd traveled through. It could just be cut from the series without loss. You could say that the first is about going from lucking into life to making strong choices, the second about avoiding making bad choices based on how people goad you, the third about making choices that enhance one's life. But really, there's no platform to do that in the second, which is a shame since moment by moment, it's the most exciting of the three. Unfortunately, Zemeckis can't climb into a time-traveling DeLorean and reshape the ending of the second movie.

Strange how just the ending can affect one's estimation of the whole. There's a quote attributed to Raymond Chandler (?) that I cannot find at the moment, which states that good book is one that you'd read even if the last page were missing. There's something to that, but a lot of mysteries do gain power in that final confrontation, superhero tales that final, grand battle, literary stories that final moving scene. We can't neglect to power of a good ending.