Back to the Future Again

So in the last week, we've shown the kids Back to the Future parts two and three. They had already seen the first one a couple months or so ago.

Of course they loved them both, although the third received a more enthusiastic response than the second, likely because it was less confusing. I'd have to agree on that score. For me, the best parts were one and three. Two was essential to set up the situation for the third part, but it seemed somewhat hastily done, and there were so many twists and "here's a scene from part one but from a different angle" that the story quickly got lost in the shuffle. The story was not as strong as the other two to begin with, and all the camera trickery muddled it further.

That being cleared up, it's a tough choice between one and three for me. Part one is a classic and paved the way, with many iconic scenes such as Marty being blown off his feet by the giant amplifier Doc made for him, the DeLorean leaving twin trails of fire as it sped into the past, and Doc's cries of "Great Scott!" at every twist and turn.

Part three was a funny homage to spaghetti westerns and just plain visually entertaining in the sets and costumes. I loved the fact that Doc built a huge contraption in the blacksmith's shop that turned out to be a refrigerator that made one ice cube at a time. The idea of pushing the deLorean with a steam engine was brilliant, and turning the engine into a time machine? The sheer beauty and genius of it at the end of the movie was the perfect final piece to the puzzle. I even wonder if the current Steampunk craze might not have started by us young adults of the time oohing and aahing over Doc's crazy inventions, and that final scene of a tricked-out locomotive sparkling all over with lightning as it zapped off to some unknown past. It certainly inspired me to read more Jules Verne.

It did not escape me that the fuel for the time circuits for the time machine went from plutonium (stolen from Libyan terrorists) to a garbage-fueled fusion reactor, back to one of the simplest forms of energy, steam. The internal combustion engine for the deLorean time machine always ran on gas, although by the time Doc converted the locomotive, it ran solely on steam. Complications reduced to simple elegance. If all we're trying to do is create steam or heat anyways, why not keep it simple? It was a subtle but wonderful thing to put in the movies, I think. Perhaps a dream for the future.

At this point I don't expect my kids to be too attentive to the underlying message, but I hope in some subliminal, impressionable part of their brain it sticks. The idea that you can take control, and change your outcome, at any point in your life. Too many times I've thought myself stuck until I ignored the whispers of the past and took that leap.

As Doc said, your future isn't yet written. It doesn't have to be so tangled up with the past. Choose the best one you can, and write it for yourself.