Today’s the Future!
I must admit I’m a big fan of the Back to the Future movie trilogy and today is a very special day: Wednesday, 21st October, 2015. This is a date that every Back to the Future fan has been waiting for since we (with the help of the internet) collectively realised this particular day is not some far off event that we will never get to see in our own lifetimes. On the contrary, Wednesday, 21st October, 2015 is speeding towards us, and at well over 88 miles per hour! Blink and the future will become the past!
For the uninitiated, in Back to the Future II, Wednesday, 21st October, 2015 is the date the main protagonists, Marty McFly, played by Michael J Fox and Doc Brown played by Christopher Lloyd, travel to from 1985 to 2015 in order to prevent Marty’s son from committing a robbery which would see him end up in prison.
However, the 2015 Marty and Doc find themselves in has very little in common with our own. The skies are filled with flying vehicles powered by nuclear fusion, speeding to their destinations along highways that float hundreds of feet in the air. Down below, the youth of ‘today’ are zipping about on hoverboards, wearing self-adjusting tennis shoes, while chomping on pizzas that have been instantly ‘cooked’ by rehydration machines that are commonplace in this alternative future.
A lot of the media has honed in on the fact that the technology of the 2015 portrayed in Back to the Future II has very little in common with our own. The producers famously missed out things like the advent of the smart phone or even the internet itself. There are lots of commentators online and in print telling us about what the movie got wrong in its predictions. Not only have so many articles written about Back to the Future day begun with Doc Brown’s exclamation, “Great Scott!” but they’ve seemed to have missed the point completely; I never really took this fictional 2015 seriously and neither did the film’s director Robert Zemeckis, who said during in an interview, “For me, filming the future scenes of the movie were the least enjoyable of making the whole trilogy, because I don’t really like films that try and predict the future… So, rather than trying to make a scientifically sound prediction that we were probably going to get wrong anyway, we figured, let’s just make it funny.” Although Zemeckis also said the this was the darkest movie he ever made.
Dark it may be in places, it is a great science fiction comedy, there’s no doubt about that – but the strange thing is that when viewed again, the movie’s future sequence seems, to me now, like a gentle pastiche of the 1980s. Back to the Future II was made in 1989, it was as if the makers were subconsciously looking to sum up the decade in which the movie was shot. All of the big cultural signifiers of the time are there: Pepsi Cola, fax machines, Jaws sequels, and of course, Beat It by Michael Jackson, you don’t get more 1980s than that.
There are various screenings around Dublin tonight, including Whelan’s and the Lighthouse cinema, or you can sit in and watch it on ITV 2 at 6,50pm. I would recommend Sweeneys at 8pm tonight personally, they’ve got a showing of the film followed by 80s tribute giants, Delorean, the name says it all! The trilogy is also re-released today on DVD and Blu-Ray. There’s only one person to sign this off and that’s Doc Brown himself who says in a promo for the DVD/Blu-Ray release, “The future has finally arrived. Yes, it is different than we all thought. But don’t worry. It just means your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it. Just make it a good one.”
