Back th the Future Part II (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, U-Drive Productions, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Back to the Future Part II (Roman numerals in the title and no comma between “Future” and “Part”) is also a nice movie, though it’s considerably darker than the first film and it’s also the only one of the series in which Marty and Dr. Brown actually travel to the future. It’s also the one with the most references to previous movies, particularly Rebel Without a Cause and It’s a Wonderful Life. The reference to Rebel comes from Marty totally blowing his cool whenever anybody calls him “chicken” – the actor playing Biff Tannen, Thomas F. Wilson (who doubles as his son Griff in the scenes set in 2015), even makes some of the infamous “cheep-cheep-cheep” noises the gang kids made at James Dean in Rebel (by the way, the real James Dean had already been dead for a month and a half when the November 1955 scenes in this film take place). The resemblance to It’s a Wonderful Life – particularly the scenes that show the moral cesspool Potterville, nèe Bedford Falls, would have become if George Bailey (James Stewart) nad never been born – comes in the scenes in which Biff has become fabulously wealthy and by 2015 totally runs Hill Valley. He’s opened a huge casino and it’s established that his fortune came from a series of outrageously lucky sports bets, starting with a horse race. Only his fortune really came from a sports almanac Marty picked up on his and Dr. Brown’s trip to 2015, which contains the results of every major sporting event from 1950 to 2000. (The magazine we see doesn’t look anywhere big enough to contain all that information, but we’ll let that pass.) Marty picked it up hoping to use it to make himself some money back in 1985, but he left it in the DeLorean time machine and Griff stole it for a joyride, flew it back to 1955 and gave the book to his father Biff.

Griff told Biff to keep the existence of the book a secret and never to let it out of his sight, and the biggest thing that happens in Back to the Future Part II is that Marty has to figure out how to steal the book from Biff before Biff can misuse it not only to make himself an ill-gotten fortune but to kill Marty’s father George and force Marty’s mother Lorraine to marry him. (There’s an exceptionally brutal scene between them in which Lorraine threatens to leave him, he strikes her down and knocks oer to the floor, and to the utter shame of her son Marty, she apologizes to him and stays together with him.) The result is a furious car chase in which Marty retrieves the book and, at Dr. Brown’s insistence, burns it. Part of the fun in watching or reading a science-fiction story set in what was still the future when it was created but is now the present or even the past is having a look at what they got right and what they got wrong. Among the things they got wrong was the same mistake that the creators of the marvelous 1930 science-fiction musical (yes, you read that right!) Just Imagine did: they assumed that personal planes would become so ubiquitous they’d fill the skies and take the place of the more terrestrial traffic jams we’re used to.

In fact, Back to the Future Part II contains an ad for a service that would convert your old-fashioned earth-bound auto into a hovercraft.and whereas the first Back to the Future shows Marty McFly breaking apart one of those homemade wooden scooters with roller-skate wheels underneath and riding it like a skateboard, Part II features a flying skateboard which Marty uses to great effect to escape the baddies, even though he runs out of power in mid-air and plunges into a lake outside the high school (which is otherwise unchanged, except for being more dilapidated, from the first film). There’s also a scene that takes place in a 1980’s retro coffeehouse in 2015, in which the record they’re playing is Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” and later when Dr. Brown tells Marty he will need to dress in proper 1950’s attire for their return to 1955 in the second half of the film, Marty dresses in the iconic costume Michael Jackson wore at the time. This in turn sets up some nice effects shots in which Michael Jk Fox has to avoid running into himself because the consequences for the space-time continuum would be disastrous if two Marty McFlys would meet in the same time stream.