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The legendary DeLorean sports car makes one stylish, streamlined time machine in the Back to the Future trilogy, the '80s classics from director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump). The first of the series is the strongest, telling the story of young Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a small-town teen in 1985 who takes an accidental trip back to 1955 in a time-traveling DeLorean built by eccentric, white-haired mad scientist Doc (Christopher Lloyd). Through a series of comedic missteps, Marty inadvertently keeps his parents (Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover) from falling in love, thereby threatening his own existence. Quite simply, this is the best time-travel film ever made, and it revels in Marty's fish-out-of-water 1980s take on 1950s Eisenhower-era innocence. With their self-assured handling of clever plot twists and time-travel paradoxes, writers Zemeckis and Bob Gale earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. And while the plot ticks with Swiss-watch precision, at the film's heart is an appointment with destiny, a single moment that sets the pattern for all the characters' lives, expressed eloquently in the film's central image of a tower clock stopped for 30 years by a bolt of lightning. Back to the Future Part II careens 30 years into the future (where the DeLorean has been made to fly) before Marty and Doc return to a nightmarish alternate 1985 (with shades of It's a Wonderful Life) that that can only be repaired by another trip back to the '50s. Labyrinthine time-travel complications are the name of the game in Part II, capped off by a brilliant reprise of the tour-de-force climactic sequence of the first film. Back to the Future Part III catapults Marty and Doc back in time to the Wild West of 1885, where fun and games with genre conventions -- cowboys, Indians, and gunfights -- and a little romance (Mary Steenburgen is introduced as Doc's true love) replace the plot complexities of the first two films. Fox and Lloyd anchor this series: Fox's boyish charm and energy is completely in sync with the film's buoyant spirit of fun, while Lloyd's archetypal portrayal of a mad-but-loveable scientist stands, along with his stint on Taxi, as the signature work of his career. And while only the original Back to the Future can be considered a true masterpiece, the sequels have a refreshing unpredictability that puts the trilogy as a whole -- along with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies -- at the pinnacle of post-Hollywood New Wave blockbuster fun. Gregory Baird

All Movie Guide

The final installment in the Back to the Future trilogy picks up where the second film left off, but it casts off the dizzying time travel of the first two films for mostly routine comedy set in the Old West. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) receives a 70-year-old letter from his inventor friend, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), who tells Marty that he has retreated a century in time to live out a relatively quiet life in the Old West. Doc Brown reveals that he hid his DeLorean car/time machine in an abandoned mine outside town, and when Marty does some research and discovers that the Doc died shortly after writing the letter, he decides to find the car, travel back in time, and warn the Doc about his demise. Meanwhile, the Doc, who has fallen in love with a local woman (Mary Steenburgen), realizes he can't hide in the past from the problems he has caused to the time flow in the previous two adventures. He reluctantly decides to return to the present with Marty, but first, they have to find a way to get the DeLorean up to time-travel velocity with a broken fuel line and no gasoline. Don Kaye

All Movie Guide

Back to the Future is Robert Zemeckis/Steven Spielberg storytelling at its best, with humor, action, special effects and a Huey Lewis soundtrack rolled together in a package that proves "Fun" and "PG" are not antonyms. Michael J. Fox, then known mostly for his role on TV's Family Ties, is a teenage everyman who fulfills the dream of escaping his go-nowhere home life and dorky parents, only to find them transformed by his own hand. Supporting him is Christopher Lloyd, let loose to do what he does best act like a complete nut in the role of mad scientist Doc Brown. The film makes the most of the notion that Fox's Marty McFly can change the future, and successfully pays off on an astounding number of plot angles. Marty not only assures his own continued existence but changes the makeup of his family and community by helping his dad grow a backbone or (if you're watching carefully) altering the name of the local mall. More than just a series of anachronisms, Back to the Future has a real heart. You suffer along with Marty's teen-aged dad George at the depredations of his tormentor, Biff, and get a genuine surge of adrenaline and pride when George finally takes his stand. Could this event lead to a changed life? In Back to the Future it does, believably. In fact, the film has more in common with the sentimental fantasy of It's a Wonderful Life than with the often-mindless action of the science-fiction pictures that followed, proving that bigger budgets and more elaborate special effects didn't exactly lead to a higher-quality summer blockbuster.

Although it was filmed at the same time as (and released only months before) Back to the Future 3, the second installment of the series seems more like it should have been filmed alongside the first. That's because the most interesting aspect of the middle film is that it returns to the events of that fateful Saturday night in 1955, adding an additional Marty to the one who attended the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, requiring perfect re-creations of original scenes (from different angles), and further heaping on the conundrums. Unfortunately, this brilliant extension of the hit first film's logic is muted by director Robert Zemeckis' garish vision of the altered future. A successful sequel duplicates the characteristics that drew audiences to the original, but Zemeckis saps the buoyant spirit from the series by presenting a world dominated by the pimp-like, unimaginably wealthy and vulgar Biff (Thomas F. Wilson). The existence of a functioning time machine begged a voyage to the future, and the end of Back to the Future previewed such, but it wasn't necessary to make it such a queasy trip. The film gets back on track when it jumps into the climax of the original, but the ending is unresolved and wanting, making the audience hunger for the next installment, but also leaving them scratching their heads, unfulfilled. Zemeckis gets points for innovation and narrative daring, and the familiar cast duplicates its earnest effort, but the spirit of the series only comes back to life in Back to the Future 3, the admittedly hokey Western that concludes the series.

An overly slight, dumbed-down spin on the Western genre is a swell concept to wrap up the show, but too little is done with the idea. So much frothy fun could have been had playing with genre conventions here that the story feels throughout like a series of mind-boggling, missed opportunities. While the first two pictures left viewers delightfully disoriented with the multiple timeline possibilities of time travel, this lackluster capper quickly settles into situation comedy territory. Far too much screen time is expended trying to work out the contrived, ho-hum obstacles of fueling an automobile on the frontier and getting absent-minded professor Doc Brown to profess his affection for a pretty schoolmarm (Mary Steenburgen). Although the second film was certainly no masterpiece, Back to the Future Part 3 (1990) is one part too many; Zemeckis and Fox and their partners should have cashed their checks from the classic first film and left well enough alone.

Product Details

• UPC: 025192213120
• Source: UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Pre-1954 Standard (1.33.1)
• Presentation: Pan & Scan
• Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
• Language: English, Français
• Subtitles: English, Español
• Time: 5:42:00
• Sales Rank: 1,427

This set contains DVDs which may be available separately:

• Back to the Future
• Back to the Future Part II
• Back to the Future 3

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