Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

I think I saw the first one of these at home. I can’t remember where I saw the second. Probably at home too. The third I saw in the theater. I was eight.

I confess I didn’t fully grasp the concept of the butterfly effect and alternate futures at that age.

I’ve written so much about the ins and outs of time travel; ironically, I can’t even be arsed to get into it here. Despite my complaints about the holes in the time travel theories utilized in these films, the films themselves were fun. There’s a reason they’ve entered into the repertoire of classic nerdy cinema.

They’re iconic. They’re full of iconic characters. Doc and Marty are the inspiration of Rick and Morty. They’re fairly easy to cosplay. Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is in them. Elijah Wood has a bit part in one.

Seriously, no time travel movie has ever been this fun. In H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, Alexander goes to the past 1,000 times to try and save his doomed fiancé. After failing that many times he decides the answer must be in the future. When all you have is a time machine, your first inclination to solve all life’s problems is to use the time machine. What does he find in the future? Morlocks. Great. The moral? Cherish the time you have with the ones you love and don’t waste it on stupid advancements in technology or you’ll be forced to go to the future and settle down in a primitive village with Samantha Mumba. Actually that seems like a pretty nice trade off really. Sure, it also made for a decent serious flick but was it fun like Back to the Future? No one has spoken about H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine since 2002. That should tell you something.

Also the 2002 movie poster is stupid. “Where would you go?” WHERE!?! Uh, don’t you mean when? The time machine never moves. It’s not a car like the Delorean. That poses an interesting problem when you account for planetary rotation and orbit around the sun but again I can’t be arsed right now.

The first BttF could have been a stand alone film. It was great just as it was and seemed to wrap up things pretty well at the end.

The second and third were filmed back to back or consecutively or concordantly or just really close together so they kind of depended on each other. At least they were able to set up the third with a number of occurrences in the second and they didn’t paint themselves into a corner. They were both great but the third was less bleak and wrapped up the series nicely. You just have to watch the third if you watch the second. No doubt.

I think that’s the real kicker here. Time travel was the whole point of the story right from the start, instead of being a deus ex machina scapegoat to get out of the corner into which the writers painted themselves.

If you read my non-review of The Cloverfield Paradox you’ll know another of my cinema pet peeves is things explained as simply magic or sci-fi mumbo jumbo. Time travel is always in danger of being just that and I hate it when it is. Dr. Strange and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves did the magic thing pretty well by not making it a beat-all-end-all do-whatever-we-want-with-it thing by giving it strict limitations and rules. Sci-fi needs to be the same way and time travel can always make major plot holes. You have to either be very careful or just expect to be a bit toungue-in-cheek with it and I think Back to the Future doesn’t take itself too seriously so it gets a pass.