Back to the Future

A film that starts in 1985 and goes to 1955. Marty is seventeen and at school. His family is a mess: a father who is bullied, a mother who drinks, a brother working in fast food. Doc is an inventor. He has turned a car into a time machine and wants to test it in a car park at night. The test goes wrong and Marty lands thirty years back. There he finds his parents at his own age. He accidentally prevents the way they met, and his mother becomes interested in him instead of his father. From there the film is a repair job. He has to get the two of them together, change his father, and wait for a lightning strike to get home. What the narrative is interested in is not time but character: the film is really built on a cowardly man standing up once, and the future changes at exactly that moment. The structure is tightly written. Every detail in the first twenty minutes, from the clock tower to the name of the shopping centre, comes back later. Part of the film was shot twice. Another actor was cast as Marty first and was replaced after five weeks of filming; Michael J. Fox was working on a television series during the day and shot the film at night. The studio disliked the title and asked for it to be changed; the producer turned the request down with a note treating it as a joke, and the title stayed. Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover and Thomas F. Wilson are in the cast. Robert Zemeckis directed and wrote the screenplay with Bob Gale. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see a faultlessly constructed script. Who it is not for: anyone who will find some of the period's jokes uncomfortable now; a few scenes show their age.