Back to the Future Part III

“Back to the Future Part iii” is the weakest film in the trilogy, but it still serves as a perfectly solid end cap to the series. The film should probably technically be called “Back to the Future 2 Part 2” but that sounds rather silly and that’s just nitpicking.

If you remember the previous film, it ended in a cliffhanger, with Marty (Michael J. Fox) discovering that Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) has been sent to the old west thanks to an untimely bolt of lightning. With the help of the Doc Brown from 1985, Marty travels back in time to 1885 to rescue his friend, who will be killed by an outlaw named Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) unless history is altered. Trouble rears its ugly head when Marty discovers that Doc has fallen for a schoolteacher named Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen)

What you like about the Back to the Future films is all here. It’s got plenty of humour, neat moments where it plays with the whole time travel aspect, plenty of memorable lines/scenes and your favorite characters once again travelling through history to have more adventures. I think my favorite sequences of “Part 3” are the ones that resolve the plot threads in the first movie. Marty having to get a better grip on his temper, the damage that time travel can have when mishandled or abused are both featured predominantly and I like that this film very much feels like a conclusion. When you think about it, Marty and Doc’s adventure through time has only really lasted a couple of days in the present, so these guys would be pretty tired, they’d want to settle down. I like that this film is about finalizing your affairs and getting ready to just enjoy life. That life might be in the old west instead of the appropriate time line, but nevertheless. Other things to look forward to are the new elements introduced. I like that this time around, it’s once again Marty coming to the aid of Doc. I also like the fact that there’s a romance element thrown in, but not with the young man!

The special effects here are impressive. The makeup, the split-screen effects (which were really well done in the previous films) and the computer-generated images hold up very well. If you were worried that a third film would feel like a tacked-on story, just a money grab, this certainly isn’t. There are many organically introduced callbacks and several lines from the second film that foreshadowed some of the events here. It’s done elegantly so there aren’t too many. It never felt to me like the people involved were just re-hashing some of the same ideas. You actually look forward to the iconic scenes, those moments that seem to repeat themselves over and over again whenever Doc Brown and Marty travel.

My only real gripe with the film is that the places the characters travel to isn’t nearly as interesting as some of the other locations we’ve seen in the past (not the past as in the history of Hill Valley, but like the previous movies-oh forget it) I feel like we’ve seen the old west before, haven’t we? I wish we could have seen like way, way into the future. We're talking Morlocks, or a human civilization so bizarre that Marty and Doc would be urgently trying to escape. I would have liked to see something new instead of the same old lassos, saloons, dusty roads and horseback rides. It’s nothing major; it’s just something that dawned on me during the last scene of the movie. That conclusion is very satisfying by the way. Don’t misunderstand me on that.

Overall, the “Back to the Future” trilogy finds a fitting end in Part iii. What you liked about the first two films are still here and there are plenty of good moments to make it more than just a mandatory chapter to see. It’s a fun story that you will want to revisit. I had never seen any of these movies in their entirety and now that I have, I’ve fallen in love with them. (On Blu-ray, January 16, 2015)