The cinema of the 80s is remembered with great affection, and for good reason. Some of the most iconic adventure and action movies in film history are from that era. The level of creativity that was present at the time, along with the directors and screenwriters involved, was enviable, leading to unique gems that are still remembered today. And in many cases, they were overwhelming box office successes. That was the success of one of the most memorable trilogies in history, which is still celebrated today: Back to the Future.
Conceived by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale and produced by Steven Spielberg, this is a franchise that started from a very simple premise. What would happen if a young person traveled to the past and met their parents at the moment they met and fell in love? What kind of disasters could it cause if they made the slightest mistake?
A movie that invented what is now a cliché
While today this story is a cliché for all kinds of series, books, and movies, it is so because of the first installment of this film franchise. Marty McFly was the original rebellious and impulsive teenager who travels through time in a retrofuturistic car driven by the eccentric ideas of a mad scientist friend of his, leading him to a wildly crazy adventure. That will only become more and more outrageous with each new installment of the franchise. But now we will get to that.
The first of the movies, Back to the Future, kept it simple. Set in 1985, the protagonist Marty McFly travels 30 years into the past, to 1955, testing the time machine that his friend and somewhat eccentric scientist Doc has built in a DeLorean. The result disrupts his parents’ relationship, almost causing him to never be born, and ultimately, he manages to return to his time without compromising either his relationship or that of his parents or the space-time continuum.
Tremendously clever and wacky for its time, heavily inspired by the television series The Twilight Zone and Superman’s time travel comics, the film was a tremendous success among critics and audiences. With a budget of 20 million dollars, it managed to make almost 390 million at the box office, not counting everything it has made on television and home formats, being surprisingly praised by most critics of the time as a clever, intelligent youth film that represents a very smart twist on science fiction stories thanks to its humor and narrative, even if its beginning is too slow and overly expository.
Winning numerous awards and being nominated for five Oscars, although it wouldn’t win any, it was the big surprise of 1985. And to no one’s surprise, the sequels arrived.
The Aftermath of the Great Success
It took four years to make their second installment, but they did it. Bringing back all the people involved in the original movie except Crispin Glover, who played Marty McFly’s father but was considered too problematic to work with, the movie promised the same, but with a different twist. This time they wouldn’t travel to the past, but to the future. But Marty, who apparently learned nothing from the first movie, gets into trouble and brings back an object from the future that completely changes the future. Because, what is the present if not the past of the future?
With trips to the future, to the past, and a direct confrontation against his great nemesis since the first movie, the bully Biff, the film is built on the premise of its predecessor, making it bigger, with more consequences, and in a way, visionary. After all, it’s about a millionaire seizing power in the US and ruining everything. But his vision is only half-true: in 1989, the year the movie was released, Donald Trump was already a very important figure in American society and had declared his intention to run for president of the US. And if this movie serves as president, the idea was not exciting even then.
On the other hand, the movie was a success again. With a budget of 40 million, it grossed just over 332 million dollars and the critics expressed a healthy enthusiasm once more. Although some critics saw the film as entertaining escapism that lacked the imagination of the previous one and the awards did not shine in the same way as in the previous one.
A beloved third movie
Just a year later and following the final scene of this second film, the third and final movie of the franchise was released: Back to the Future III. With Doc self-exiling to the past, specifically to the year 1885, Marty will have to go to his rescue when he receives a message that something is very wrong and his old friend needs his help. This is resolved in a film with all the tropes of the western, tremendously clever, and which serves as a perfect conclusion to the emotional core of this outstanding trilogy of films.
Costing another 40 million dollars, this time they raised only 245 million, if we can say only when talking about those figures. And the criticism was, surprisingly, much more positive than regarding the second one. Although the ambition of the second installment was much greater, with a more convoluted plot and trying to embellish everything with many superficially deep themes, the much purer and more direct intentions of this sequel to make a fun movie, focusing on the characters and their relationships and how it uses western tropes, captivated the critics. And not without very good reasons.
After the trilogy, the franchise was closed without any further attempts to revive it. Not in the cinema. It has had television series, video games, pinball, biographies of its actors, and everything imaginable in terms of merchandising, but no one has ever proposed a fourth movie. And it’s better this way. Because now you can watch this excellent trilogy on Netflix that, moreover, doesn’t need to become a tetralogy for us to remember how good it is.
