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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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120489
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12048900.041
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1990-09-19
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CINEMA, Page 101More Travels with MartyBy Richard Schickel
BACK TO THE FUTURE, PART II
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by Bob Gale
Time travel is the thinking person's UFO, an improbability that
nevertheless resonates with mysterious and sometimes marvelous
possibilities. But it has become a rather tired topic. It is almost
as hard nowadays to create fictional vehicles capable of
reawakening childhood reveries about zapping through the years as
it is to invent a scientific instrument actually able to journey
up and down the old continuum.
All the more remarkable then that the director-writer team of
Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale has created, in the space of just four
years, two terrific movies on this subject. Like its predecessor,
Back to the Future, Part II does not merely warp time; it twists
it, shakes it and stands it on its ear. But as before, the film's
technical brilliance is the least of its appeals. Satirically
acute, intricately structured and deftly paced, it is at heart
stout, good and untainted by easy sentiment.
Future II opens with a deceptively simple errand to run. Doc
Brown (Christopher Lloyd) wheels up to Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox)
in that lovable time machine (a goofily customized DeLorean) with
bad news: Marty's son -- not yet even a gleam in his father's eye
-- is in trouble in the year 2015, and there is just enough time
to save him from a life of crime. The dauntless duo, accompanied,
of course, by Marty's girlfriend Jennifer (Elizabeth Shue), must
head off to give future history a quick fix.
The world they find is not entirely disagreeable: shoelaces
tie themselves; the criminal-justice system works efficiently
because lawyers have been eliminated; the Chicago Cubs have finally
won the World Series. Young McFly's salvation, though it requires
a certain strenuousness, is quite simply accomplished. On the other
hand, the personal future that Marty and Jennifer discover is not
what they dreamed it would be. Something has gone quite nastily
wrong.
That brutal jerk Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) -- he who
almost destroyed Marty's parents' lives in 1955, and from whom
Marty rescued them in the earlier film -- has survived into the
21st century too. What's worse, on their voyage into the future
Marty and Doc unwittingly provide him with the means to construct
a dark alternate history beginning in 1955. Over its course, Biff
has managed to turn pleasant little Hill Valley, Calif., into a
hellish variant of Las Vegas, with himself as its czar. He has even
contrived to make Marty's mother a widow and marry her, turning her
into an alcoholic and Marty into an abused stepson.
Doc and Marty have no choice. They must return again to the
scene of their first intervention in history, that high school
dance that climaxed Future I. All along this story line, Marty has
been encountering variations on himself, his progenitors and heirs.
But when he is reinserted into this moment in time and starts to
meet himself and the situations of the previous movie, Back to the
Future II ceases to be a sequel. It becomes instead a kind of
fugue, brilliantly varying and expanding on previously stated
themes. And it accomplishes this while retaining its powerful
narrative drive and its infectious geniality.
Coming right after Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which
was equally rich in invention and astonishment, the movie
establishes him as today's most exciting young director. And makes
next summer, when the concluding episode in this saga will be
released, a season to anticipate.