Back to the Future II

Doc, Marty, and Jennifer travel to October 21, 2015, because Marty and Jennifer's kids are acting up. In 2015, Biff steals the Delorean, and gives the 1950-2000 edition of Gray's Sports Almanac to his past self in an effort to get rich. Doc and Marty repair the past in 1955, and while attempting a return to 1985, the Delorean gets struck by lightning zapping Doc back to 1885, and stranding Marty in 1955.

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The second part of the Back to the Future series of sci-fi comedies. The plot is partly a rehash of the first movie except set in the future (2015) and an alternate present as well as 1955. The time travel 'theory' behind the plot makes very little sense, and is further stretched by allowing members of multiple generations of the McFly and Tannen families to look identical so that they can be mistaken for each other. Most of the cast of the first film get made up to look old or young at some point.

The most incongruous part is that Doc Brown insists that Marty doesn't mess up the course of history (by betting on sports events with the aid of the Sports Almanac), but freely does so himself, and for the first third of the movie attempts to get Marty to alter his own future so that he doesn't become a failure. So it's one rule for the Doc, another rule for everyone else.

As with the other movies in the series, the theatrical release is slightly longer due to the presence of several product placement sequences. These include a Texaco hovercar garage, Pepsi Perfect ($45 per serving), AT&T videophones and electronic locks, a Black & Decker rehydrator oven, Pizza Hut dehydrated pizza, Nike powered trainers, a USA Today robot photographer, and a Mattel hoverboard.

Because the movie was made in 1988, its vision of the future is based on an extrapolated version of the 1980's. Unsurprisingly many elements look out of date now, never mind 14 years in the future. Marty Sr. has fax machines in every room of his house, while his kids watch 6 TV channels at once. Embedded computers are everywhere, but they talk with a Hawkingesque sythesised voice. There is no internet or mobile phones (at least that we can see). The local cinema is playing a holographic version of 'Jaws'. While in the Cafe 80's in 2015 (one thing that the film does get right is the prevalence of crappy 1980's nostalgia), Marty gets dissed by a young Elijah Wood for playing video games with his hands.

We can see that this vision of the future is not even internally consistent: one minute an advertisement proclaims that hovercars mean that traffic problems are a thing of the past*, the next minute Doc complains that the 'skyway' is too congested to get to Marty's house quickly. The hover cars are presumably powered by fusion and yet there is a Texaco (petrol) garage.

The film resembles a Universal Studios ride crossed with a particularly commercialised Epcot Centre attraction. It does prove however that creating a flashy prediction of the near future (even one that makes no sense under close scrutiny) makes for good (and lucrative) entertainment.

*But then I suppose adverts lie in any age.

To respond to fondue's points...

Granted, the plot of Back to the Future Part II uses a more developed time-travel theory than its prequel. The most common gripe/plot hole is that Biff Tannen is able to return to the 2015 from which he left, even though he radically changed both his life and the landscape of Hill Valley. The common response is that events are not changed instantaneously, a theory which is not disproven anywhere in the series.

Indeed, the scene where Biff returns to the future was cut short--he exits the Delorean in great pain, staggers behind a dumpster, falls to the ground (apparently dead), then slowly fades away, as if "erased from existence." This part of the scene was cut, deemed too confusing; however, it seems to confirm this theory, that a radical shift to another parallel universe takes some amount of time.

As for Doc's apparent hypocrisy...

Doc Brown drops Marty off at home near the end of Part I. He immediately travels to the future; what he did there we can only speculate. Most likely he tried to see what Marty was doing in the future and was dismayed to find Marty a failure and the entire McFly family in ruins.

He discovers the ultimate cause of this: Marty gets in a car accident in 1985 (spurred by his refusal to back down from a challenge), injures his hand, and effectively wrecks his music career. Jennifer feels sorry for him (parallel with Marty's parents) and marries him; fast forward to 2015, and Marty is stuck in middle management, his children up to no good, and his wife a drug addict.

Doc remembers how Marty changed history to save Doc's life, even though it could potentially have done damage to the space-time continuum. Marty is perhaps Doc's only friend; and so Doc wants very much to fix things for Marty, but knows that to explain all this to him would be dishonorable from a scientific standpoint, and potentially damaging to the universe. However, he knows that to prevent the jailing of Marty's son is damage control, so he allows himself to tell Marty about it and alter the course of events for a good cause.

The reason Doc gets so mad at Marty for purchasing the Sports Almanac is exactly what he says--he didn't invent the time machine for financial gain. His alteration of time was good-intentioned; Marty wants to alter time to make himself rich.

Of course, later in Part II Doc admits that travelling through time in general is a horrible idea; and that with the small amount of travelling they've done, Doc and Marty have done plenty of damage.


As for the movie's portrayal of the future, of course it's rather dated. An accurate depiction of the future would require a good amount of clairvoyance, and I'm sure that a genuine portrayal was not the intent in the first place. The movie projects 2015 as having grown straight out of 1985, thus all the product placement.

Texaco is still around, yes, but there's no implication that they're still in the business of gasoline--nor is there the implication that fusion technology now powers all cars, rather than just being a luxury of the rich.