“Welcome to the future, ya’ll! It’s a pretty safe bet that if you were anywhere near the internet in the past week, you know that this past Wednesday was October 21, 2015. Okay, you didn’t need to be online to know the date, but even those of you not thoroughly plugged into pop culture should know the significance of that date. In Back To the Future Part II, when Marty and Doc travel to the future, that’s the date they go to. The world’s been abuzz evaluating what they got right and what they got wrong, and generally celebrating one of the greatest movies of all time. So of course on such a significant pop culture occasion, I organized a movie watching party at work!
For me, watching the movie was mostly about an excuse to revisit a classic. So many wonderful moments I remembered, some that I had long forgotten, and some that I’d never noticed before. This really is an incredible series with great characters and captivating plotlines. Time travel is so hard to get right. Keep it too simple, and you can’t buy it. Make it too complicated, and everything else is lost. Here they found the right balance between the two, and they don’t get bogged down in the details.
So how does that future compare to ours? Besides our current lack of flying cars and hoverboards of course? The major difference is the internet. So much of our technological advances in the past 30 years are due to that, which was a concept that no one had grasped in the mid to late 80s. Most of the film’s future technology revolves around improving and/or automating our day to day objects, whereas in reality we’ve mostly left things as are and invented new stuff. Still, the movie has influence somed real life replicas.
Possibly the biggest strength of these moves are our leads, Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd. They breathed such life and charisma into our main characters, that you really do want to follow them throughout all time and space. What’s even better is how game these two are for reliving and celebrating those films. Fox celebrated the occassion with a visit to Jimmy Kimmel. The pair teamed up with Toyota for a special commercial. They know how much we love these characters and they love them too.
I was born in ’85, when the first film came out, which means I would have been 4 when part 2 was released. So it must have been a ways down the line before I saw them. I don’t know how much I’d look to that future and wonder where I’d be at 30, but reflecting now, I’m pretty sure I never really imagined where I currently am. It may not be the future Spielberg imagined, but it works pretty well for me.”