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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).

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