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🎬 Back to the Future Part II — The Future Can Also Become the Past

rodrigosegade1000
Thought

Thought

Ovid

The letter waiting seventy years at Western Union and still reaching Marty in the rain reminds me of how this series of yours works, one movie at a time, each one picking up what the last one left open. Thanks for posting the second one so soon after the

The letter waiting seventy years at Western Union and still reaching Marty in the rain reminds me of how this series of yours works, one movie at a time, each one picking up what the last one left open. Thanks for posting the second one so soon after the first! I bet Part III is already half written.

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After a first film that, to me, works almost like a perfect mechanism, Back to the Future Part II had one of the hardest problems any sequel can face: continuing a story that did not really need to continue. Marty had returned home, George had changed, Doc was alive, the McFly family was different and even the DeLorean returning could have worked simply as one last joke before the credits. The first movie had closed almost everything. The second therefore had two options: repeat the formula or break it. I like that it chooses the second.

Part II takes everything the first film fixed and proves that nothing is truly permanent. The future can interfere with the present, the past can be altered again and one apparently insignificant decision can create an entirely different reality. If the first movie gave time travel a concrete objective — make sure George and Lorraine fall in love and then get home — Zemeckis and Bob Gale now push the rules until time becomes a genuine puzzle. Yet underneath all that complexity lies a very simple question: what would we do if we could know the future and use that information to our advantage?

That is where the sports almanac comes in, and to me it is the great idea of the film. Marty is not thinking about ruling the world or becoming all-powerful. His reasoning is much smaller and therefore much more human: if he is already in 2015 and can know the results of every major sporting event for the next thirty years, why not take that information back to 1985 and make some money? It sounds almost harmless, but that gesture contains practically the entire conflict of Part II. Until that moment, traveling through time had meant discovering. The almanac introduces another possibility: turning the future into inside information.

Biff immediately understands the real power of that object. With the almanac, he no longer needs to guess, wait or take risks. He has the answers before the questions even exist. The more I think about it, the more unsettling that fantasy becomes, because a huge part of our lives is built around not knowing. We choose a career without knowing exactly where it will take us, we fall in love without knowing how long it will last and we make decisions without knowing every consequence. We live because we do not know what comes next.

Gambling when you know the result is no longer gambling, and choosing when you know exactly what will happen begins to look a lot less like a choice. That is why the alternate 1985 works so well. It is not simply “Hill Valley, but darker.” It is the physical consequence of one man using time to eliminate uncertainty and accumulate power. The first movie showed how one moment of courage could travel across decades and transform a life for the better. The second discovers the reverse of that idea: one decision can also build our worst possible future.

Before all of that, however, there is 2015. I love that Zemeckis did not try to imagine a solemn or apocalyptic future. His 2015 is exaggerated, plastic and almost like an amusement park: hoverboards, flying cars, self-lacing shoes, giant screens, instant food and technology everywhere. Some predictions ended up strangely close to reality and others stayed completely within fantasy, but reducing that section to “what did they get right?” misses something much more interesting.

For me, one of the best ideas in that future is the Café 80s. Marty travels thirty years forward and discovers that his present has already become nostalgia. 1985 is not historical to him. It is simply his life: his clothes, his music, his products, the things he sees every day. But by 2015 all of that can be packaged, stylized and sold as memory. The first film allowed 1985 to look back at 1955; the second lets 2015 do exactly the same thing to 1985.

Suddenly the movie finds an idea about time that is much more interesting than any flying car: every present is destined to become the past. There is something strange about thinking that while we are living. Clothes that seem completely normal today will one day instantly date a photograph. A song we hear without thinking might come to represent an entire decade. An ordinary object might become a collectible. Time does not merely age people. It turns everyday life into a historical period.

Hill Valley once again becomes fundamental in expressing that idea. We had already seen it in 1955 and 1985; now we see it as a futuristic city and later completely deformed by Biff’s reality. The same place can be bright, decayed, technological or outright nightmarish depending on the moment we are observing. It is the same city, but it is never really the same city. Zemeckis does not need to constantly talk about the passage of time because he can show it by changing a sign, a building, a store or a town square. Time becomes architecture.

There is another future Marty discovers in 2015 that is even more interesting: himself. In the first film, Marty had the chance to meet his parents when they were his age. Now he faces something much more uncomfortable: he can meet the man he himself might become. And what he finds is not particularly heroic. His career did not go the way he hoped, his life is shaped by an accident and Needles is still able to manipulate him through exactly the same weakness he had as a teenager: his inability to tolerate someone questioning his courage.

That makes the trip to the future much less fun than it first appeared. Would we really want to meet ourselves thirty years from now? Because we would not only see our accomplishments. We might also see our failures, our regrets, the things we never did and the things we allowed ourselves to lose. There is something almost cruel about seeing a future version of ourselves before we have lived the decisions that led there: seeing the result before knowing the path.

Perhaps knowing that version too early could itself become a prison. If somebody showed us exactly who we would be in thirty years, we might start living every present decision as proof of something we believe is inevitable. But Back to the Future insists on exactly the opposite: nothing is inevitable while there is still a decision left to make. The adult Marty is not necessarily who Marty will become. He is who Marty could become, and that difference becomes essential in the third film.

This is also where his problem with being called “chicken” becomes much more important. In the first movie, Marty mainly functioned as the catalyst for George’s transformation. Now he needs a conflict of his own, something inside himself capable of producing consequences, and the film finds pride. Marty can cross decades, face Biff and understand temporal paradoxes, but the moment somebody questions his courage he loses perspective. The saga finally finds a problem no time machine can solve: he can travel to any era, but he always travels with himself.

That creates an interesting relationship with George as well. In the first movie, George needed to discover that he could defend himself. His entire life had been defined by fear, and his transformation came from choosing to stand his ground against Biff. Marty will need to learn the other half of that lesson. George needed to understand that confrontation is not always dangerous. Marty will need to understand that walking away is not always cowardice. The second film does not resolve that conflict yet; it plants it for the third.

Formally, Part II is also far more ambitious than the first movie. Zemeckis multiplies characters, timelines and situations in which a person can share the frame with another version of themselves. But the best expression of that technical ambition comes when the movie makes a decision I still find extraordinary: returning to 1955.

Not merely returning to the year, but returning literally to the first movie. We go back to the dance, to George and Lorraine, to Biff, to Marty playing “Johnny B. Goode,” and to events we already know almost by heart. But now we are looking from somewhere else. We see what was behind a car, on the other side of a door or outside the original frame. The Marty from Part II has to move around the Marty from the first film without crossing paths with him, while we watch familiar events from entirely new perspectives.

That is where the film becomes almost metacinematic, because rewatching a movie is also a form of time travel. The movie remains the same, but we do not. A scene that made us laugh at fifteen might move us at thirty. We can suddenly notice a performance we ignored, discover something happening in the background of a shot or understand a line that once meant nothing to us. The past did not necessarily change. The person returning to it did.

That is exactly what Part II does with Back to the Future. Zemeckis goes back into his own movie and discovers that there was still another possible perspective hidden inside images that seemed finished. The sequel does not merely travel into Marty’s past; it travels into the past of the movie itself.

It constantly rhymes with the original too. A chase returns, but the skateboard has become a hoverboard. Biff returns. The manure returns. The dance returns. The clock tower returns. The second film seems to remember the first constantly and distort it without ever repeating it exactly. That matters because Part II also becomes, in a strange way, a film about memory. We remember certain moments as fixed images, but when we return to them we almost always discover something we had left out.

Maybe the time of our lives is less like a perfect line and more like the way Part II represents it: a network of decisions that we only fully understand when we look backward. There are moments that seem insignificant while they are happening and years later we discover that they changed everything. A conversation, a person, a choice made almost without thinking. The present never comes with a sign telling us which moment will matter.

Zemeckis also returns to something that worked beautifully in the first movie: turning abstract temporal concepts into concrete objects. Instead of relying only on exposition, we have photographs, newspapers, headlines and documents changing in front of our eyes. The future rewrites itself physically. A newspaper changes, a photograph changes, a name disappears and we understand. Cinema makes visible something that otherwise exists only as an idea.

Not everything works equally well for me. Crispin Glover’s absence is noticeable because it reveals, retrospectively, just how much heart George brought to the first film. Jennifer also becomes almost a narrative problem the movie has to remove from the board. And Part II inevitably loses some of the emotional simplicity of the original. There is more exposition, more rules, more timelines and more moments where the film has to stop and explain what is happening.

That makes it less perfect than the first, but also stranger and, in many ways, more daring. The first is an extraordinarily precise emotional story disguised as science fiction. The second begins to enjoy the device itself and wants to discover how many times it can bend time before it breaks. Yet beneath all that temporal complexity, Zemeckis remains obsessed with bodies, objects, speed and timing. Many sequences can still be reduced to something as simple as who has the almanac, where it is hidden, who gets into a car or who arrives one second earlier. The plot can be complicated, but the action is almost always crystal clear.

And then comes that ending. Marty stands alone in the rain. Doc has disappeared and, for the first time, it feels as though time itself has won. Then a Western Union employee arrives with a letter that has been waiting for decades. Doc is alive. He is in 1885.

I love that moment because after a film full of futuristic technology, flying cars, screens, hoverboards, time machines and alternate realities, the most important message arrives on a piece of paper. Somebody wrote something, decades passed and eventually it reached the right person. There is something deeply romantic about that idea.

Maybe our own relationship with time works a little like that. We leave things behind without knowing when they will return. A letter, a photograph, a song, a movie. Something can remain still for years until somebody finds it and suddenly it is alive again. Time is also what we manage to deliver to someone who was not yet there to receive it.

That is one of the reasons Part II becomes much more interesting to me than simply “the one set in the future.” It is actually obsessed with the past: with the future becoming past, the present becoming nostalgia, an old movie becoming the setting of a new one, a teenager seeing the person he might become, and one decision made decades earlier destroying everything that once seemed stable.

We spend a huge part of our lives imagining the future as if it were a place that already exists and is simply waiting for us to arrive. We say, “when I’m thirty,” “when I get that job,” “when I’m with that person,” “when I have money,” as if somewhere down the road there were a completed version of ourselves waiting to be discovered.

But Back to the Future Part II suggests something far more unsettling and, at the same time, far more liberating:

that person does not exist yet.

We are building them now.

Marty’s future looks written when he sees it in 2015, but it depends on decisions he has not made yet. In the same way, Biff’s alternate present seems like an absolute reality until we discover the tiny moment in the past where it began. Maybe that is why we want so badly to know the future: because knowing would give us the illusion that there is an order to everything, that all of this is heading toward something already determined.

But perhaps not knowing is precisely what allows us to be free. If we knew all the answers, we would stop living the questions.

Marty does not fully understand that yet. He is going to need one more movie. Part II therefore feels less complete than the first because it is not built to end. It is built to leave an idea unresolved that the third film will have to answer.

Marty has spent two movies believing that traveling through time can help him repair what went wrong. He still has to discover that the most important decision in his future does not require a DeLorean.

It only requires the moment to arrive and for him to choose differently.

Thoughts

  • exvangelical_em

    The bit about seeing the result before knowing the path is the one I would not want. For me old Marty pushed around by Needles at 47 is the scariest thing in the trilogy and there is no monster in it.

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  • primary_sources_only

    The Western Union letter is the one 2015 prediction the film got backwards: the company stopped sending telegrams in 2006, so a letter held for seventy years and hand delivered in the rain is now more science fiction than the hoverboard. For me it is funnier every year.

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  • occams_chainsaw

    The almanac fantasy is less unsettling than the piece makes it, because the book would stop being right the moment somebody acted on it. Biff bets, the odds move, a fighter takes a dive that was never printed. Inside information only works while nobody else has it, and the film quietly hands him thirty clean years.

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  • define_your_terms

    Knowing the future does two jobs here: the almanac knows results that stay fixed, adult Marty is a future that is not fixed at all. I hope the Part III piece keeps them apart.

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  • Ovid

    The letter waiting seventy years at Western Union and still reaching Marty in the rain reminds me of how this series of yours works, one movie at a time, each one picking up what the last one left open. Thanks for posting the second one so soon after the first! I bet Part III is already half written.

    Permalink
  • maybe_im_wrong

    My hunch is the Cafe 80s is the best idea in the movie and the almanac is the best plot, and the film never decides which one it is about. Did you rewatch all three back to back for this?

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