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| Written by Scott Fogg |
Back to the Future is a perfect film.
I do not say that hyperbolically. It is a factual statement. When talking about movies, it’s one of my favorite statements to make it. In fact, I love it so much, I’m going to say it again.
Back to the Future is a perfect film.
Watch it again and notice how every moment of every scene either is telling you something about the characters or is progressing the story. Every set-up has a pay-off. There’s not a single scene you can delete that would make the movie a stronger, better film.
Do you know why?
Because Back to the Future is a perfect film.
But that’s the film nerd in me. Before I went to film school, though, and learned about three act structures, I was just a kid who wanted nothing more out of life than to master the guitar, own a DeLorean and do sick tricks on my skateboard. Spoiler alert: I’ve accomplished none of these. But what Back to the Future has given me is something so much richer, so much more important.
I’m a writer. I’m a writer because I’m a storyteller. I’ve told stories on stages, on screens and in print. The first stories I told, though, were in the sandbox. Armed with an inspired imagination and with nothing but my G.I. Joes to work with, I began spinning stories. I used to regurgitate stories. Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow were brothers, I knew this because I read the comics. Cobra Commander sounded like Starscream because I watched the show. The adventures they would get in together often mirrored what I read or what I saw.
Then Back to the Future happened. Suddenly, the fantastic and the phenomenal were reachable.
I loved Star Wars growing up but watching it, there was something elusive about it. Like there was a part of me that always knew, I would never be a Jedi Knight. I couldn’t be. I tried to move the rock with my mind and it never budged. After hours of holding out my hand, trying to pick up my toys without touching them, I had to finally succumb to the realization that I would never be Luke Skywalker.
But I could be Marty McFly. Sure, he was cooler than me and could do things I couldn’t do. But he was a guy, just like me. He went to school and got picked on people, just like me. He had a friend who invented a time machine, just like . . . well, not exactly. But Doc Brown’s time machine wasn’t something from another planet. It wasn’t built with parts and components that don’t actually exist.
It was cobbled together with household objects. Doc Brown was smart, he knew things I didn’t, he invented the flux capacitor, but he did it in a way that made me believe I could do it too. And I did.
I made a time machine out of a cardboard box, some paper bags, a lot of stickers, some utensils I stole from my mother’s kitchen and some computer components I found by the dumpsters outside my school. I wasn’t a DeLorean, but I’m pretty sure Marty would have gasped all the same, “you made a time machine . . . out of a U-Haul box!?”
I did, Marty. And when this box gets to eighty-miles per hour, you’re going to see some serious S-Word.
The movie inspired me. Sure, I re-enacted it and recited it. But it also inspired me and emboldened to me tell my own stories. I didn’t have to wait for someone to deliver me the next amazing sci-fi adventure. I could make my own. I didn’t have to stick to the script. I could write my own – so I did. Just like Doc Brown, I took what I had, applied what I knew, and filled my childhood with adventure.
It’s an adventure that led me to theater and then film and now comic books. It was not an adventure I was able to predict. If I jumped from 1985 to today, I would have been just as shocked as Marty was when he arrived in 2015. If I was able to meet that six year-old (and not faint), there’s so many things I would want to tell him.
But chief amongst them would be, “yeah, I know this isn’t what you imagined. But it’s exactly where you should be. Now it’s up to you to get here. Because the future hasn’t been written yet. No-one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one.”
I could go on and on. The cast, the special effects, the music, the dialogue . . . But, honestly, if you’re reading this, you already know. You know it frontwards and backwards, from 2015 to 1885. But now you can say it knowing you’re not exaggerating when you say Back to the Future is a perfect film.
