Chapter Two: Back to the Future Part II
By Brett Beach
July 29, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Just prior to helming Forrest Gump and steering that sentimental, bittersweet tale into the top ten highest-grossing domestic pictures at that time with a $330 million total — and making off with an Oscar for Best Director to boot - Robert Zemeckis directed the very bizarre, very black comedy Death Becomes Her, a ruthless satire on aging, vanity and plastic surgery, perhaps now best remembered for a nifty special effect shot featuring Goldie Hawn's character with a shotgun hole blown clean through her. Death performed decently, opening at number one with $12 million, finishing with nearly $60 million in North America and a worldwide total of $150 million, against a $55 million budget.
I draw the comparison both as a lead-in to this week's sequel - which in terms of style and tone falls squarely into category two - but also as an example of the polarity of tones existing in Zemeckis's career, at least up through the start of this decade, when he became obsessed, apparently, with making animated films using performance capture technology. Last week, I expressed consternation at special effects that create things that seem so nearly absolutely realistic that it becomes unnerving, and films like The Polar Express and Beowulf land under this heading. As a critic, I am required to see the films before I can opinionate, but until I can acclimate myself to how creepy "Tom Hanks" looks "playing" the train conductor in Express, I will have to say I'm not quite buying into it just yet.
Zemeckis has frequently been a go-to man for effects-heavy tales, and for seamlessly incorporating the effects into the storyline, but his material has always seemed to alternate between cynical/screwball (Who Framed Roger Rabbit or the underrated Used Cars being good examples) and more earnest dramas (i.e. Contact). Keep in mind as well that during the ‘80s and ‘90s, he was an executive producer and frequent directorial guest on HBO's Tales from The Crypt, and that under the Dark Castle production company banner, he has executive produced numerous schlocky horror movies, House on Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts among them. It may seem odd to single out Zemeckis for having distinct contradictory facets to his directorial persona — I mean, that is what we cherish about the talents we love — but whenever I consider his career in particular, I always feel as if his darker tones are where his heart is at and he feels compelled to do penance with more sincere material.
The Back to the Future films capture all of the sides of Robert Zemeckis in an appropriately dizzying way. Smack dab between the raucous high-spirited teen comedy of the first and the more laid-back Old West vibe of Part III, is Back to the Future Part II, a frenetic, dark, relentlessly cynical exploitation and send-up of the goodwill and cheer of the first film and 108 minutes of strum und drang that leads, somewhat anti-climactically, to a pleasant, light-hearted conclusion in the final installment of the trilogy. If it sounds like I am gearing up to whack BTTFII pinata-style, far from it. I find a lot of pleasures inherent in BTTFII, even if they come at the expense of what made the first film so enjoyable.
Back to the Future rode the wave of Michael J. Fox's small-screen popularity, Steven Spielberg's name on the credits, and an admittedly brilliant story conceit (courtesy of Zemeckis and his writing partner Bob Gale) to great acclaim and the slot as the top-grossing film of 1985. By ignoring intervening decades and focusing strictly on a 1985 meets 1955 time warp - and by providing a comic answer to the query "What were my parents like when they were my age?" - BTTF got to trade in both modern pop culture hipness and faux-bobbysocker nostalgia. The fact that the "hip" teen from now (played delightfully by the wonderfully not-hip Fox) transforms things back then so that he winds up returning to a present stocked with more attractive consumer goods and "cooler" parents, well that detail was certainly not lost on the youth. Even with the cliffhanging ending of BTTF, it's not as if further installments were necessary.
That said, I think a lot of people were put off with where BTTFII took its protagonists and especially with how blatantly it ends with a setup for Part III - as in the promo reel of clips that ends the film proper and leaves one with the impression that what was just seen was a really long commercial for the next film. It was already well known going into Part II that the sequels were being shot back-to-back and that Part III would be out a mere six months after Part II. The overt shilling is a little much, but completely in line with the themes of commercialization, greed and that dominate the film.
A running gag or theme throughout the trilogy isn't so much that the more things change, the more they remain the same, but rather that things are always the same, no matter what. Marty McFly always bristles at being called a chicken no matter which decade (or century) he is in. The Tannens always torture the McFlys. Doc Brown is prone to exclaiming "Great Scott!" as if he were eternally trapped in a production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Also, manure will regularly unload on the Tannens, and Marty will outwit Biff or Griff or Buford).
BTTFII's complicated and not as audience-friendly strategy is to replace the pleasant nostalgic shock of present-meets-past from the first film with a combination future shock/nostalgia for the present (the 1980s as a decade). This occurs by pushing the action 30 years into the future (2015) at the film's start and then setting a good portion of the action in that time frame in an ‘80s-themed diner, which seemed odd even back then. Viewing the stuttering Max Headroom-esque video celebrities (Reagan, the late Michael Jackson Jackson, the Ayatollah) taking food orders via television screen is simply bizarre 20 years later. It's fascinating to me to look at what was being pushed as nostalgia for the decade before it had even properly finished.
If Marty was the key character of the first film and Part III allows Doc to take center stage and enjoy a little romance, then it must be said that Biff is the star of BTTFII, which in and of itself explains a lot about the darker tone and more violent nature. This time around, in regards to the film's perspective, I am reminded of Tom Stoppard viewing Hamlet through the eyes of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or at the very least, The Lion King saga being filtered through the prisms of Timon and Pumbaa. Biff is the instigator of the action this time, pushing the plot into motion, and some version of him is present in most of the scenes. This is also affirmed by the fact that Thomas Wilson plays as many roles in the film (four) as does Michael J. Fox, although not, thankfully, having to pull off a female version of or sister to Biff. Wilson is the underrated linchpin of the series and his portrayal of elderly Biff here is, dare I say it, touching?
To me, the unacknowledged joke of the series is that for all Doc's nattering about how Marty shouldn't use the time machine for financial gain (the alternate 1985 created by Biff is supposedly a testimony to the corrupting power of using time travel to profit and creates a vision of high-towered opulence overlooking ghetto squalor that feels like social satire a la George Romero), Marty's altering of events in the first film certainly changed things in his and the McFly's family favor, financially speaking. Thus, when Doc sets out explaining to Marty how they must once again return to 1955 to stop Biff from giving himself the sports almanac, it is never suggested "fixing" what Marty screwed up in the first film, and life going back to how it once was. An interesting moral dilemma to ponder.
After one-third 2015 and one-third hellish Biff-ruled 1985, the last half of BTTFII is set in 1955 back on the same day on which the first film ended. This for me is where the dizzying logic of time travel and paradoxes - which is probably my most favorite aspect of science fiction - makes me the giddiest even as the film strip-mines BTTF to give us events overlapping events. With two sets of Docs and Martys running around town - the newer ones taking great pains not to bump into their counterparts - we are presented with a lot of the same footage or recreated climatic moments from the first film, but with the added perspective of another Marty or Doc. Why, it's almost a meta commentary on the process of a sequel going back to the well to give an audience just what they loved about the first film. Zemeckis and Gale do that and but in spades. BTTFII builds to at least three different climaxes and then of course, ends with its kicker of a cliffhanger.
Anticipation may have been high for Back to the Future Part II and it did end up performing reasonably well by comparison - earning $118 million or well over 50% of BTTF — but by the time the third installment came along in May of 1990, another large chunk of audience had fallen by the wayside and the result was $81 domestic total. It's not hard to discern from that trajectory that the poor word-of-mouth from the middle chapter stopped many from taking a chance on even what was billed as and has remained (knock on wood) the conclusion.
I remain curious as to whether at some point in his post-Gump travellings, Zemeckis will get the itch to angle for something with a little more venom and bite, something that just might take the chance on alienating audiences again. Not a good business model, I understand, but hey, Death Becomes Her 2 has possibility. No?