 Starring: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, Thomas F. Wilson
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Year Of Release: 1985
Plot: Teenager Marty McFly is invited to a mall parking lot by his friend, Doc Brown, where he discovers the scientist has built a time machine out of a DeLorean. Due to the arrival of Libyan terrorists, Marty ends up accidentally using the machine to travel through time and ends up in 1955, where he inadvertently stops his parents from meeting, therefore putting his very existence in jeopardy. He’s also got to find a way to get back to the future. |
I sometimes wonder where my life would have ended up without Back To The Future. As a little kid I remember quite liking movies, but I could take them or leave them. I know ET made me cry and I can remember going to watch Disney cartoons at the cinema, but I can’t say that in my very earliest years, cinema made the biggest of impacts.
Then Back To The Future came along.
I must have been seven or eight at the time it arrived in my local video shop. Well, I call it a video shop, but it was actually just the corner of a grocery store, which eventually got tapes of films in years after they’d been available everywhere else. Luckily I came from a space-age family that had a top-loading VCR, which even had a controller that was only attached to the machine by a little wire (I know, it’s like we were living in The Jetsons or something), so my parents rented the time travel movie for me and off we went home to watch it.
I don’t think I knew much about the film, other than it’d been popular at the cinema. When BTTF first started playing I thought the film was alright – I remember enjoying Marty getting blasted across the room by the giant amplifier – but at the moment Michael J.. Fox jumped in the time machine and got it up to 88mph, something clicked and I was absolutely hooked.
I thought it was brilliant and the moment it was finished I rewound it and watched it again (ah, those were the days, when you had to rewind things).
It was like something inside me had been switched on and I suddenly realised what films could do. They weren’t just a way to pass a couple of hours so you didn’t get bored, they could genuinely excite you and set your brain on fire with ideas and possibilities. Even at that age I can remember getting very confused trying to work out the time paradoxes and what would really happen if you went back in time.
Thankfully it wasn’t until later that I started to think about the fact that Back To The Future is essentially a film about a mother who falls in love with her son and aggressively pursues him, and that he eventually decides the only way to set things right is to grope the person who gave birth to him. When you’re seven you don’t think about Oedipus complexes much, even if according to Freud you’re busy having one.
Of course the rented video had to go back to the shop, and so shortly afterwards I went to town and bought Back To The Future for myself. It was the first video I ever purchased with my own money.
I watched that tape a ridiculous amount of times. The thing was barely out of the VCR. Within a few months I could quote virtually every line, I knew the lyrics to Johnny B. Goode and The Power Of Love, I’d got the music on CD, I’d read the George Gipe novelisation and could tell you pretty much everybody in the credits list. It would not be an exaggeration to say I was obsessed.
In fact I watched it so much that within a year I had to buy a second copy of the video because I’d worn the first one out and it didn’t work any longer (although because it was so important to me, I do still own that very first BTTF videotape).
After Back To The Future I didn’t see films in same way anymore. The good ones became an all-absorbing window into an alternate world where you could travel through time, or meet an alien, or turn into a werewolf or go up against a killer shark (my mother likes the recount how much I used to enjoy watching the giant fish eat Quint in Jaws, and then press the rewind button so that the shark would spit him back out again, which at the time I found the height of hilarity). For me movies were no longer just a bit of entertainment, but a fully fledged passion.
I found more and more films that I really liked and started amassing as many videos as my pocket money would allow. While initially it was mainly the fantastical movies that I enjoyed, soon I started finding other sorts of film, and by the time I was in my teens I was watching a broad range of movies and discovering all that cinema had to offer.
In fact on my 16th birthday, which is when most people do fun, exciting, teenager things, I made my friends go with me and watch Anthony Hopkins being repressed in Remains Of The Day. I think we were the only people under 45 in the cinema, but at the time that was my idea of a good night out.
Even at that point Back To the Future was still my favourite. It was through my endless viewings of the movie that I began to realise the power of cinema, what it can do, and how a filmmaker creates that. BTTF taught me about film storytelling through how economically the whole film is set up. There is barely a line of dialogue in that film that isn’t necessary and hasn’t been set up in the first 15 minutes of the film. It showed me how directors can use repetition and visual motifs to create connections and feelings in the viewer. It revealed the power that music and sound has in movies. There is undoubtedly no other single film that has taught me more about cinemas.
And from there my obsession with movies continued to grow until I went off and studied film at university and then, for my sins, became a movie journalist, writing about cinema for a living.
Perhaps if I hadn’t discovered Back To The Future, there might have been another movie that came along and ignited a genuine fire for film inside me, but it’s difficult not to wonder whether, without Marty McFly and his time travelling adventures, my life might have gone in a completely different direction.
Whatever it was about the movie, it had a truly profound effect on me and there’s no other film that’s been quite as important to my life as Back To The Future has. It was the starting point for an obsession that has become my life, whether that’s healthy or not.
So I suppose I ought to take this opportunity to thank writer/director Robert Zemeckis, co-writer Bob Gale, actors Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover and Thomas F. Wilson, and everyone else involved in making the movie. They’ve certainly had a massive impact on my life, and may actually be responsible for the fact this website exists in the first place!
So do other people have a single film that sparked their love of the movies? If you do, it’d be great to hear about it in the comments below.
TIM ISAAC
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