Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Tagline: Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

Curiosity: It’s a sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi/comedies of all time, and picks up seamlessly where the original left off. Surely nothing could go wrong.

Plot: The morning after he successfully returns to 1985 following the events of Back to the Future, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) jumps through time again, into the year 2015 with his science buddy Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and girlfriend Sleepy (Elizabeth Shue, Adventures in Babysitting AND Karate Kid). Turns out Marty and Sleepy’s kids suck, and Doc Brown has a plan to fix that. No, it doesn’t involve taking a hooker to prom or taking off those dorky glasses. Rather, Doc has Marty impersonate his son, Marty Jr., in order to prevent Griff, grandson of Biff (both played by Thomas F. Wilson) from getting him thrown into prison. It works, but Sleepy falls asleep and gets carted off to Future Marty’s house. Biff steals the DeLorean and makes some adjustments to the timeline.

Then shit gets fucked.

Thoughts: Holy crap this movie sucks. It sucks worse than Marty’s shitty kids suck. Wow. Writer/director Robert Zemeckis has said he never wanted to make a sequel, and it kinda shows. Part II takes the old Hollywood strategy of repeating a movie’s formula for sequels (“different, but the same”) to heart, literally recreating the most iconic moments from the first film, but in a lame attempt to be all “Everything is connected and cyclical and we are one lick me!” Even with a budget twice the size of Back to the Future, Part II actually manages to look worse, thanks to its reliance on awful prosthetic make-up to make the principal cast look older (or, in the case of Marlene McFly, girlier). Oh yeah, and they wrote out Crispin Glover but hired someone else (Jeffrey Weissman) to play George McFly, with some Crispin enhancements tacked on. Throw in a convoluted time-jumping plot, twists that don’t make sense, and an especially bogus ending, and Part II is kind of like the Matrix Reloaded of its day – a louder, dumber follow-up to a truly original classic.

Yet I found Part II interesting for reasons that have little to do with enjoying the movie or its plot. I thought the hoverboards looked cool, and it’s funny that Zemeckis’ joke about them being real persists as an urban legend today. Part II kicks the Oedipal relationship between Marty and his mom (Lea Thompson) up a notch by having her be extra-chesty for a scene. I liked how Fox dresses in drag for what amounted to a bit part. If this were an Eddie Murphy or Mike Myers movie, that would've been a key plot point, most likely coupled with fart noises. But my favorite element was the story behind George McFly’s portrayal in the sequel.

When Glover asked for more money than the producers were willing pay, it was decided that they’d just use a combination of old footage and unfocused shots of Weissman to replace him. Given that George’s most prominent scene is as an old man in 2015, Weissman looks about as much as George with all that horrendous make-up on as Glover probably would have. Decades before CGI was developed enough that people could start debating about the ethicality of replacing actors with special effects (a la, say, Arnold Brownschwagger’s cameo in Terminator: Salvation, or that shitty commercial where an actor dressed like Albert Einstein endorsed Pepsi. God, fuck Pepsi forever, always digging up famous dead people why I aughta…), Zemeckis and co. pulled that very trick on Glover. Pissed that they used his likeness to make the movie without paying him a cent, Glover sued Universal Studios. The Screen Actors Guild has since added a clause stating that studios and networks have to compensate actors for derivative (recycling, faking) use of their work/likenesses, which I think is fair. Also, knowing that this issue was resolved like 20 years ago makes the CGI debate a lot less interesting.

Reflection: Actually, Back to the Future Part II is more like Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (also starring Christopher Lloyd!). It’s not that great on its own, but it bridges the gap between two way better movies.