#41 — Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)

In a recent article, Mark Harris argued that he could pinpoint the exact day when movies died, bypassing the arrival of Jaws and Star Wars–benchmarks commonly cited by cineastes dismayed about the preponderance of desperate blockbuster wannabes on the slates of the major studios–to set the blame squarely on the 1986 cannon blast of mindless testosterone that is Tony Scott’s Top Gun. Harris basically argues that the stabs at summer fare–the purely enjoyable popcorn movies–that came before that has some amount of ambition to them, a sense of pride and craftsmanship. Jaws and Star Wars were, after all, really good movies besides being runaway smashes. The recipe for success required some craft, some heart and at least a dash of respect for the audience. Top Gun tipped over the hourglass and made the sand run backwards. It was cynical, shallow, kinetic, manipulative and robotically constructed, none of which prevented it from becoming a massive hit. Much as I loathe the film, it hadn’t previously occurred to me to single out it as a damnable tipping point of American studio cinema, but perhaps it should have. While I’d never thought to name the movie that ushered in the darkest cinematic days, I’ve long felt that an offering from one year earlier represented the last gasp of the worthy summer blockbuster.

Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis and written with his regular collaborator Bob Gale, is an unabashed piece of pure entertainment. There are interesting, even somewhat weighty themes that can be culled from it to be sure, but the main drive and appeal of the movie is as a concentrated dose of fun, playing with the space-time continuum and personal histories like they’re the foundation of the most enjoyable board game yanked from the stack of diversions in the closet. It is funny, warm and endlessly clever, filled with an abundance of kinetic colors and characters that virtually tremor with personality. Zemeckis has a real skill for slick narrative filmmaking, befitting someone who is both an artistic progeny of and a devoted peer to Steven Spielberg. There’s not a misstep to be found among the shot selections and the general pace and rhythm of the film. More than it’s exemplary craftsmanship, the film exudes pure joy in the simple act of making movies, of building up a story, throwing complications at it like so many darts and engaging in the act of solving them, or having the characters solve them.

That pleasure contradicts the obvious stress that Zemeckis and his collaborators must have been feeling, operating with a budget beyond anything bestowed upon them previously and recasting the central role after several weeks of shooting. That potentially devastating shift proved to be the necessary alchemy to make the film work. Michael J. Fox has almost superhuman innate skills for charismatic comic delivery, and no other director employed it nearly as effectively as Robert Zemeckis, cuing off the actor’s genial relatability to make the absurbed named time traveler Marty McFly into the classic upended everyman, serving as both an ideal comic foil and the figure who can slyly toss off his own sharp lines. Fox could get a laugh by just reacting to a muscle-bound bully extending to full height in front of him, and Zemeckis leveraged every moment into popcorn-fueled magic.

Of course, it’s overly simplistic to tag this the last worthy summer movie. As this list moves closer to the top spot, my selections with contradict that assertion several times over. But it does feel like the last of its own unique breed: a summer movie that fit a certain mold, but did so with creativity and generosity and an innocent verve. If a movie like this arrived somewhere in the summer of 2011, it would come across as an aberration, if not a throwback that was arrived upon almost by accident. In those sweltering days of summer 1985, it was one of the last times that a belief that this sort of movie could be the summer norm wasn’t plainly crazy. In that respect, thinking about Back to the Future is its own sort of adventurous time travel.