“Getting back was only the beginning,” the poster promised. Back to the Future Part II keeps that promise in the most literal way possible: it gets back, and then it keeps going, past the point where the story had anywhere left to go. Robert Zemeckis directed it from a screenplay by Bob Gale, with both men conceiving the story. It runs 108 minutes. It is an adventure, a comedy and a science fiction film, and it is the second installment in the Back to the Future franchise. It is also the moment the series started treating its own cleverness as the main attraction.
Trailer, via Fathom Entertainment.
The DeLorean Lands in 2015
The premise is a good one. On October 26, 1985, Doc Brown arrives unexpectedly in the DeLorean and persuades Marty McFly and his girlfriend Jennifer Parker to travel to the future with him. Their errand is family business: Doc warns that Marty’s son Marty Jr. is headed for trouble with Griff, Biff Tannen’s grandson, and that the trouble leads to a chain of events that destroys the McFly family.
Doc incapacitates Jennifer and leaves her asleep in an alley rather than let her learn about her own future. Marty is told to switch places with his identical son and refuse Griff’s offer. Griff calls him “chicken,” Marty takes the bait, and a hoverboard chase follows. Griff and his gang are caught by the police in 2015. What happens to them after that, the film does not say. The future children are saved. That is the movie’s first act, and it is the part that works.
An Almanac and a Stolen Time Machine
Then Marty buys an almanac listing the results of major sporting events from 1950 to 2000. Doc finds it and warns him about profiting from time travel. Before Doc can dispose of it, police arrive with an incapacitated Jennifer and take her to her 2015 home. Marty and Doc pursue. An elderly Biff, who overheard the conversation, retrieves the discarded almanac.
Jennifer wakes in her 2015 home and hides from the McFly family. She overhears that her future with Marty is not what she expected, because of his involvement in an automobile accident. She watches Marty get goaded by his co-worker Douglas Needles into a shady business deal, which gets him fired. She tries to escape and faints after encountering her future self.
Biff steals the time machine and returns it. Marty and Doc go back to 1985, leaving an unconscious Jennifer on her front porch. The almanac has done its damage.
Elisabeth Shue and Jeffrey Weissman Step In
Two recastings define the supporting cast. Elisabeth Shue replaces Claudia Wells as Jennifer Parker. Jeffrey Weissman replaces Crispin Glover as George McFly, though Glover still appears in archive footage from the first film. Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson and Thomas F. Wilson return, and Fox does triple duty as Marty, Marty McFly Junior and Marlene McFly.
The margins are crowded. James Tolkan returns as Mr. Strickland. Billy Zane, Casey Siemaszko and J.J. Cohen come back as Biff’s cronies Match, 3-D and Skinhead. Griff’s 2015 gang includes Ricky Dean Logan as Data, Jason Scott Lee as Whitey and Darlene Vogel as Spike.
Flea plays Douglas J. Needles. Donald Fullilove, who played Goldie Wilson in the first film, appears uncredited as his hovercar salesman grandson Goldie Wilson III. A young Elijah Wood is one of the two boys Marty teaches to play Wild Gunman. Charles Fleischer plays Terry, who in 2015 indirectly gives Marty the idea to bet on sports and in 1955 is Biff’s mechanic.
VistaGlide and the ILM Problem
The film was produced on a $40 million budget and shot back-to-back with Part III. Filming began in February 1989, after two years spent building sets and writing scripts. Industrial Light & Magic used the VistaGlide motion control camera system, which let an actor play multiple characters on screen at once without giving up camera movement. That is a real technical achievement, and the movie leans on it hard.
Here is the trouble. Technical achievement is not the same thing as a reason to keep watching.
Where Back to the Future Part II Goes Wrong
The 2015 sequence is a pile of gags about the future, and the movie asks them to carry more weight than they can. The hoverboard chase is the best of it. Everything around the chase is decoration.
Then the plot turns on a sports almanac. That is the hinge of the whole film, and it is a thin one. A prop that lets a character get rich by knowing scores is not a story; it is a mechanism for moving characters between set pieces.
The middle act suffers most. Jennifer hides in a house, overhears bad news about her marriage, watches Marty get manipulated at work, and faints. She is asleep for the alley, asleep for the porch, and conscious only long enough to be told her life goes badly. Elisabeth Shue is given almost nothing to do with the role she inherited.
Worse, the film hands off rather than finishes. Universal released it on November 22, 1989, and Part III was shot back-to-back with it. The two halves were built as one production, and the seams show.
What the Cast Does With the Material
Wilson is the engine. He plays Biff and Griff, and in this paper’s view the older Biff who steals the DeLorean is the closest thing the movie has to a real antagonist. Wilson plays him as a man who has been waiting his whole life for an opening, and the almanac is it.
Lloyd is reliable. Fox is asked to play three versions of the same person and keeps them distinct without much help from the script. Tolkan’s Strickland is a joke repeated from the first film, which is the pattern across the board.
The 1989 Reception and the Score
Universal Pictures released Back to the Future Part II on November 22, 1989. Reviews were mostly positive. The published critical score sits at 5.7 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 57 out of 100.
That number is about right.
What the Sequel Costs Itself
This paper’s view, not a claim from the source: set beside the 1985 film, the sequel gives up ground on the counts that matter most.
- Its central plot device, the sports almanac, is a convenience rather than a story.
- Jennifer Parker is written out of her own subplot by way of a fainting spell.
- The 2015 sequence trades character for spectacle.
- The 1955 return is a rerun of ground the first film already covered.
- It is built as half of a two-part production, so it carries no weight of its own.
The VistaGlide work is genuinely important, and the hoverboard chase holds up. Neither is enough to make Back to the Future Part II stand on its own. It is a bridge between two better movies, and it plays like one.
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