It’s 1985, a time of skateboards, rock guitar licks, teen lusts and pretty schoolgirls with big hair. Oh, and completely hapless parents.
Seventeen-year-old Marty McFly has to deal with it all. And, honestly, he’s kinda ticked about it.
I mean, sure, he doesn’t mind the skateboarding or the pretty, big-haired girls. But the rest can be a struggle: Marty’s teachers don’t appreciate his guitar-wailing art, he’s struggling at school, and his dad lets his bullyish boss wreck the family car. Ugh! There go his weekend plans with the current squeeze.
But it turns out that there are other things in the offing for Marty anyway.
His eccentric scientist friend, Doc Brown (oh yeah, everyone has an older scientist bud in the ‘80s), is working on an experiment. And he asks Marty to meet him in the wee hours of the morning over at the local mall parking lot to document it all.
It turns out Doc has hornswoggled some Libyan terrorists for a stolen case of plutonium and transformed a DeLorean into a time machine, as one is wont to do. But then, those pesky terrorists show up expecting their promised nuclear bomb and, well, everything goes sideways.
Before you can say, Duck! They’ve got guns! Doc gets shot, and Marty ends up in said time machine and transported back to the past. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s no plutonium to get home with.
Nope, Marty is stuck back in 1955, a time of rolled up jeans, bobby socks and teen lust … between his mom and dad!
OK, that last part hasn’t happened yet, but it’s supposed to. Unfortunately, when Marty runs across his teen parents, Lorraine and George, he sorta messes things up between them. And the trajectory of their lives head in different directions. (Including Lorraine crushing on a cute guy she’s just met named Marty. Yikes!)
Now it’s up to Marty to figure out how to get them to fall in love—if he doesn’t want to cease to exist. And that won’t be easy since his dad is a geeky peeping Tom with the backbone of a jellyfish. Oh, and let’s not forget the task of getting back to where he came from. And somehow saving Doc.
Oh brother! Here he thought 1985 was tough.
Although the movie’s take on time travel and its impact is rather broad and silly, the story does suggest that the choices we make shape our lives. And the story looks at ways that a simple adjustment in life (reaching for goals, standing up for what you believe, etc.) can have positive outcomes in the long run.
This pic also lightly promotes the positive influence of loving parents.
Doc Brown sets the time machine to “December 25, 0000” as an example of the day Jesus was born.
At the end of the film, we see that an Assembly of Christ meeting is being held in what used to be the local movie theater.
Marty is rather casual about his relationship with his girlfriend Jennifer. He ogles other girls in tight clothing while with her, and he gives the impression that he’s only interested in the pretty teen girl as a weekend sex partner up in the mountains. She writes him a note saying she loves him. (By the end of the film, however, we learn that they marry in the future.)
The film has a running obsession of sorts with (and a slew of jokes about) underwear. Marty spots George peeping on a local woman who’s standing in her window dressed only in bra and panties. And then George later talks to Marty about touching a woman, while holding up his mother’s underwear. Lorraine is very focused on Marty’s purple undershorts, too, after he’s knocked out and put in her bed to recover. She talks about looking at his underwear while he’s unconscious and noticing that he had his name written on them: “Calvin Klein.” Marty quickly covers up while trying to get his pants back on.
Lorraine also puts her hand on Marty’s thigh at dinner and asks him to stay overnight in her room to recover from his accident, hinting that they could get closer. Marty balks at all these advances. She coos over her attraction to him. Eventually Lorraine bares her shoulders in the car and leans forward to seductively advance on Marty. But when they kiss, she suddenly pulls back, saying that it feels oddly like she’s kissing her brother.
George certainly fancies Lorraine, but she really isn’t interested in him initially. George and Lorraine kiss, both in the ‘50s and in 1985. The older George grabs his wife’s backside playfully. Marty and Jennifer kiss.
Sexual assault was often treated as a comedic plot point in various movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s (Sixteen Candles and Animal House come to mind.) And we have another such scene here. A local bully named Biff has his eye on Lorraine, too. But he’s more than happy to aggressively make his desire known. The large guy grabs her at one point, telling he that he knows she “wants it.” She slaps his face in response. But later, a drunken Biff shoves his way into a car with Lorraine and it appears that he intends to forcibly have his way with her. The movie plays the potential rape in a somewhat light comedic way with the struggling pair seen from a distance and Lorraine’s feet in the air. Someone rescues her before things go any further.
Some of the movie’s violent action consists of comedic pratfalls as Marty runs from Biff; crashes the DeLorean into a theater and a barn full of hay; and often finds himself falling into slapstick tumbles.
But there are some more serious violent moments, too. Doc Brown appears to be shot down by terrorists, for instance. And that killer then aims at Marty before his gun jams. The bad guy then shoots an RPG in Marty’s direction and blows up a photo booth in a mall parking area. The Libyans crash their speeding vehicle into a building, too.
Elsewhere, Doc Brown dangles precariously from the top of a tall building. He barely avoids being electrocuted by a blast of lightning that sets a cable and other objects on fire.
Marty gets knocked unconscious after being hit by a car. Biff is punched in the face several times. And in turn, he roughly manhandles Marty, Lorraine and others.
A man shoots a shotgun in Marty’s direction, missing him. A man cuts his hand while trying to jimmy open a car trunk. He then wraps the bloody appendage with a cloth.
We hear about a half dozen s-words and a dozen or so uses of uses of “d—n.” Other surprisingly frequent profanity includes multiple uses each of “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “h—,” “a–” and “a–hole.”
God’s and Jesus’ names are both abused more than a dozen times total (with God’s name being paired with “d—n” twice). Someone uses a racial slur to refer to a Black man.
Lorraine lights and smokes a cigarette. Another student lights up outside a dance as well. Several musicians climb out of a car full of smoke after smoking weed.
It’s implied that a heavily drinking adult Lorraine is an alcoholic. And we see the roots of that addiction when she’s a teen and takes a swig from a bottle of booze that she “swiped from my old lady’s liquor cabinet” (a scene that also, perhaps unintentionally, shows how parental drinking habits can influence their children). Marty balks at her drinking. “You might regret it later in life,” he tells her before taking a sip himself. “Anybody who’s anybody drinks,” Lorraine responds dismissively.
A bit later, though, a drunken Biff proves Marty’s point in another way. A drunk on a park bench sits up after being awakened.
There’s a running joke about Lorraine’s younger brother, who is destined to be sent to jail repeatedly.
After crashing his car into a manure truck, Biff and his friends are covered in hay and animal waste.
After almost 40 years, Back to the Future is getting a (another) rerelease. But, ya’ know what? Time has changed some things.
I mean, sure, it’s still the same movie. It’s still the rollicking slapstick comedy that launched Michael J Fox’s movie career and became the first of a hugely successful, award-winning, trilogy of films. But when seen through a modern-day lens, this film is a DeLorean of a different color.
For instance, do you recall that Fox’s protagonist, Marty McFly, is kind of a girl-ogling lech who’s planning on sneaking away to sex up his girlfriend? And that his mom is a depressed, vodka-swilling alcoholic? Or that his dad was a teen peeping Tom spying on neighbor ladies in their undies?
For that matter, do you remember this pic’s underwear obsession and Oedipal themes? Or the rape that was “comically” set up as part of the conclusion? Do you recollect how packed with foul language this ‘80s comedy was?
All that while earning a PG rating?
The answer to the above questions is … probably not. I didn’t remember it all. And I was kinda surprised.
OK, maybe I’m being a little overly critical and grumpy while sitting here in the future. But, hey, that’s the kind of insight time is supposed to give us. Along with the knowledge that things of the past (and some movies) aren’t always as family friendly as we might remember.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
