MovieDudes review : Back to the Future (may contain spoilers!)

Back to the future is a story about a young slaker (translation : 'waster') called Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) who accidentally finds himself hurtling thru time when a documentary he's filming goes strangely wrong..

BTTF is a remake of Orson Wells 1960 classic movie 'The Time Machine' only with a novel twist for the 80's generation! You see, in 'Back to the Future' the protagonist doesn't travel into the future to learn the fate of mankind, oh no! In this modern retelling Marty travels BACK into the PAST. Bet ya didn't see that coming?

Now you may think to yourself 'where's the excitement and adventure in a situation like that? After all, people back in the olden days were harmless & stupid and besides, if things did get dangerous, couldn't he just hop back into the car and fly right back to good old 1985?' Well, my friend, the answer would be NO! And I'll tellya why...

You see the time machine in this movie works on the prinsiple that if you fill a car up with plutohnium (a special kind of petrol) you can travel to anytime in history once you go past 88kph. All well and good except that in 1985 you couldn't just buy plutohnium at the local Texaco, so Doc (Martys best friend & also the guy who invented DeLorian) steals some of this precious fuel off a bunch of Iraki terrorists.

Now, hard enough as plutohnium was to get in '85 you could forget about getting some 30 years earler because back in 1955 (where Marty now finds himself) there WAS no Irak (or Iraki terrorists for that matter), hense no need for plutohnium to be invented! No plutohnium means no time machine and no time machine means no way back to the year 1985 for Marty! And that dubly sucks, because Marty has a hot date with his girlfriend Jennifer (Elisabeth Shoe) on Saturday night and he'd better not be late!

To compond problems yet further Marty accidentally bumps into the 1955 version of his mother (who is now aged just 17) and she becomes infaturated with him. You can work the consequences of that one for yourself my friend!

Anyway, All of this majorly freaks marty out so he finds the Doc (Christopher Lloyyd) to ask for help getting him get 'back to the future'. Doc is a bit sckeptical at first because back in the 50's nobody understood how to time-travel like we do today but he eventually agrees to help under the provisoh that Marty stops screwing up the future and fixes the mess hes already made thru meeting his mother.

So Marty is set the task of getting Mom and Pop together or else he won't be born and the Doc will be very miffed. Dya get me? This film is pretty complicated as you can tell, but after watching it about 5 or 6 times it started making sense to me.

So, can Doc fix the time machine? Will Marty be able to unite his future parents before he disappears into the space-time-continuous? Will the Iraki's get their com-upa-nce? All these questions (and more) will be answered during the movie and the answer to them all, I'm glad to report, is YES !

Finally, film purists (before dismissing BTTF) should also note that this movie isn't just a piece of throwaway blockbuster rubbish either. It's a film with a message and that message is that if you ever find yourself stuck back in time then remembr DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING! Have ya got that!??! Or failing that be sure to change everything BACK quickly before leaving or else who knows what could happen!

Food for thought, indeed!

Movie Dudes rating : ***** (out of 4!) yep, its that good!