Back To The Future 3 (1/5)
Posted on 18 Mar 2011
The third film in the series faces the matter of love trumping logic as we witness Doc Brown falling for a woman over the weekend, despite knowing he must travel back to 1985 by Monday in order to escape death. The love story script and acting are both atrocious and save the fun bits about technology and time travel leave this film a very crap soap opera executed at junior high intelligence. The other story is Marty and his perpetual battle with cowardice as we see him face down Biff’s name-calling for the umpteenth time (“What’s the matter, you yellow?”). The proper and mature character resolution is made in the third act as Marty defies community pressure to face off with Biff’s great granddad bully Mad Dog. But, the filmmakers being wise and desperate realize this won’t make for fun cinema and drag Marty out for the duel anyway where he gets to show his Eastwood wits and punch Mad Dog’s lights out. He learns the hard lesson of renouncing machismo and violence and then proceeds to gain the benefits of embracing it two minutes later. And finally, the train-pushing-the-DeLorean action sequence displays truly backwards storytelling–that is, the writers sat down and first pondered what elements had to be crammed into the scene to maximize the tension, never wondering if the sequence was in and of itself flawed or limp. Case in point: we have three colored logs that are placed in the engine’s furnace that will fire at different times and make the train jolt forward for a moment, causing all sorts of mayhem. (There are dozens of other similar gimmicks and replays of the previous films that have me convinced the Bobs had one good idea ten years previously.) The lightening bolt sequence at the end of the first film, in contrast, was wonderfully constructed of tension from the stormy weather and technical snafus, the lightening rod and the DeLorean.
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