Is Back to the Future 2 secretly the greatest sequel of all time?
Fans of the first film were let down by the ‘needless darkness’ and ‘overstuffed plot’ of number two. The subsequent 35 years, however, have welcomed a whiplash-inducing reappraisal of Robert Zemeckis’s sci-fi classic. Geoffrey Macnab travels back in time to discover what changed
A sequel to Back to the Future was inevitable – a cinematic certainty from the moment the Universal studio bosses did their bean-counting and found their 1985 time-travelling comedy had made $388.8m (£299m) on a shoestring budget of $19m. Call it Hollywood pragmatism or Hollywood greed, either way they never would’ve let a money-maker like this die.
“Back to the Future became this giant hit – a piece of corporate real estate,” director Robert Zemeckis told Jonathan Ross in 2019, explaining how he and co-writer Bob Gale were press-ganged into making a follow-up. “We were sat down by the heads of the studio, and they said, ‘Look fellas, we’re going to make a sequel, and you can either be part of it or not.’”
Back to the Future Part II, then, which saw the return of both Michael J Fox’s Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd’s mad scientist, was far from a passion project. Zemeckis was too busy finishing Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) to devote much attention to the sequel early on, with most of the initial work being done by Gale instead. And Fox was only available to shoot in the evenings and at weekends – contracted to finish the final season of Family Ties during the day.
To its detractors, this was theme park filmmaking at its worst – less a film than it was a brazen attempt to cash in on some lucrative IP. (Sure enough, Back to the Future rides were soon after introduced at various Universal amusement parks). Critics were similarly cynical, with reviews initially very equivocal about the second film, made back-to-back with a third instalment (which didn’t help the cash grab accusations). “Strains credibility,” complained Variety, though that’s arguably an unfair criticism of a film dealing with time travel. Elsewhere, it was called a “rushed job”.
The special effects were the exception, widely admired for being ahead of their time, though that applause did not translate into silverware (or even nominations) come awards season. Commercially, Back to the Future Part II didn’t do as well as those bean-counting Universal execs had hoped, grossing $332.5m globally – a decent haul but significantly less than its predecessor.
Nonetheless, as the years have passed, Back to the Future Part II – back on the big screen next week for its 35th anniversary – has undergone a reappraisal. Its reputation improves exponentially with every re-release. so much so that it is now commonly regarded as among the best sequels of all time, alongside The Godfather Part II, Terminator 2, The Dark Knight, and Toy Story 2. Not bad for a film once called “a sequel for a sequel’s sake”.
It helps matters that over the years, the film has had some very influential, albeit unlikely, champions. Leading American scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan marvelled at its sophisticated use of overlapping timelines, reportedly telling Zemeckis and Gale that it was the “best movie ever made on the science of time travel”. Of course, more valuable than any scientific thumbs up is the fact that the sequel is actually very good. Building on its predecessor, Part II combines superbly choreographed slapstick and witty satire with mind-bending notions about time and parallel universes. It’s a film with a heart too, looking in poignant fashion at family and relationships.
Devotees now regard the movie with near-religious affection. Jeffrey Weissman, who starred in the film as Marty’s dad George, tells me of its sky-high standing within Back to the Future fan clubs like the Hill Valley Telegraph, named after the movie’s fictional California town. In the film, Marty zooms forward in time from 1985 to 2015 to prevent his lookalike son from getting into a disastrous scrape, and then rushes back to 1955 to prevent the villainous Biff Tannen from ruining his own future. Granted, that synopsis boils down an extraordinarily complex storyline to its crudest basics, but you get the gist.
Perhaps Back to the Future 2 needed a long gestation period before people could come to see its genius. Undeniably, one of the greatest pleasures in watching the film today is seeing what Zemeckis and his team got right (and wrong) about the year 2015. In the director’s vision, teenagers get around town on floating electric skateboards – not quite the reality today, but hoverboards do come pretty close. Likewise, we’ve not quite reached the age of hydrometres (used in the film to cook pizzas) but we do have microwaves. And as for flying cars? Elon Musk is already busy designing those.
Other elements of Zemeckis’s brave new world are similarly prescient. Last year, Hollywood was shut down by actors’ and writers’ strikes in part due to fears over artificial intelligence. In the Californian town that Zemeckis depicts in his sequel, AI has already taken root. In bars and restaurants, you order food from computer-generated video waiters. (Max Headroom-like facsimiles of Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan inform customers about the tortillas and sushi on offer).
The film is ingenious, too, in its comedy. There’s one particularly effective skit where Marty thinks he’s about to be eaten alive by a giant shark only for it to turn out to be a hologram: a marketing gimmick for Jaws 19 with the tagline: “This time it’s really personal.” (The tag line for 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge was, “This time it’s personal.”) “The shark still looks fake,” Marty murmurs when he realises the creature isn’t real. At least the film’s executive producer, Steven Spielberg, didn’t mind being the butt of the joke.
Back to the Future 2 built on the nostalgia and humour of its predecessor. Crucially, though, it also doubled down on its darker elements – often forgotten amid the wild antics of Marty and Doc Brown. Who can forget the notorious incest storyline? A strange Oedipal twist in which Marty’s mother-to-be hits on him. That first movie also saw Marty discover the reasons behind his father’s devastating meekness; in the second, Marty watches as history repeats itself when his own hapless son is beaten up by local punk Griff Tannen.
The art direction was remarkable… with the devices all around the McFly 2015 home, the detail was unreal. Only a fraction of it really made it to the screen
At the time of its release, people criticised Back to the Future 2 as needlessly bleak. In the dystopian version of 1985 Hill Valley, we see Marty’s family in shambles with Doc committed to a mental institution and Biff in power and married to his mother. At one point, Biff threatens Marty at gunpoint – the introduction of a firearm certainly upped the ante for a franchise previously known for its hijinks. It was enough to give fans whiplash. Viewers who had been expecting round two of silly shenanigans were instead landed with turbulent family melodrama. With time, though, people have come to appreciate those darker moments and enjoy the film on its own merits.
Those fans have also come to cherish what was initially decried as an “overstuffed plot”. While Back to the Future kept to a linear structure (as linear as possible given it’s a film about time travel), its follow-up zig-zagged back and forth between eras. These days, though, that fluidity is regarded as what makes the sequel so rich and wonderfully strange.
Universal certainly didn’t skimp on recreating either the past or the future. The budget was $40m, more than double that of the first film. Weissman, who took over the role of Marty’s father George “at the 11th hour” after Glover’s exit, was told by Zemeckis that the effects were, in fact, more complicated on Back to the Future 2 than they were on his other film Who Framed Roger Rabbit – considered groundbreaking at the time thanks to its combination of live action and animation. “The art direction was remarkable… with the devices all around the McFly 2015 home, the detail was unreal,” Weissman tells me. “Only a fraction of it really made it to the screen.”
Weissman recalls spending the “better part of two weeks” on set hanging upside down – his character having been in a car accident 30 years earlier, sustaining injuries that require him to be kept dangling from his ankles. “When I was hanging upside down, one of the crew members came over and said all this torture was meant for Crispin,” the actor recalls, adding that some people thought the writers put George upside down because they wanted to disguise the change in actor. “That was not the case,” he clarifies. The plot point was written in, Weissman adds, because Glover wasn’t able to hit his marks in the first film. Keeping George trussed up and immobile solved the problem, then – albeit in a very cruel fashion.
Glover’s absence admittedly is a black spot on the sequel. The actor clearly had a fractious relationship with the filmmakers the first time around – and later sued them for “violating his right of publicity”. He had given an excellent performance as Marty’s meek and tormented father, but the studio didn’t want him back, or they weren’t prepared to pay him enough, or they resented the actor for having requested approval over the script. (Accounts vary). In the end, Glover was understandably bitter about being discarded and replaced by an actor made up to look like him – upside down or not.
In 1989, the cliffhanger ending caused uproar among viewers, many of whom felt they had been cheated – left in the lurch with no satisfaction. They didn’t know that a third film was on the way. “The biggest fight that I had with the president of Universal when we were planning the release of Part II is that I was adamant that I wanted to advertise this as part two of the three-part Back to the Future series, part two of the trilogy, and he didn’t want to do that,” Gale told Den of Geek in 2020. “He just wanted to say, ‘This is part two. Let them find out about part three later.’” Watched now, with the safety of knowing a resolution is still to come, the sequel’s “to be concluded” ending doesn’t rankle nearly as much.
More than any change in cast or lack of a firm ending, though, it was the critical snobbery that most severely damaged the sequel’s reception. It was a sci-fi comedy – and so wasn’t taken as seriously as the award-contending heavyweight pictures of the era. In fact, this was everything you would rightfully expect from a decent sequel: not a dreary reprise of the first feature but an example of original, adventurous, and subversively offbeat filmmaking.
Now, 35 years on, it’s clear that far more craft and ingenuity went into Marty McFly’s time travel escapades than into any of those earnest, self-righteous dramas that ran off with the Oscars that year. None of those films ever inspired their own theme park rides either, so maybe Marty got the last laugh after all.
‘Back to the Future Part II’ will be back in UK cinemas on 21 October to celebrate its 35th anniversary
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