What Makes Great Storytelling? - “Back to the Future” Series - Maya Alexander
Picture from Academy Center of the Arts
With July 3rd marking the 35th anniversary of the film, Back to the Future, I wanted to look back on what I believe to be the greatest action film ever made. For context, I don’t normally find myself perusing action or sci-fi films for fun in my spare time. I found Back to the Future as a 13-year-old back in 2015 channel-surfing and immediately got hooked, I sat through all three movies of the series in one sitting and wasn’t bored once. Now I understand why this film was so attractive and would be pleasing to casual viewers -- it’s the perfect action film.
A look back at the 1985 film shows the basic characteristics of classic, captivating storytelling. From the main character, Marty McFly, being the poster-boy for “hero’s arc” narrative writing to the “villain” Biff Tannen, paradigmatic of every stereotypical bully in film, this movie is as cookie-cutter as a movie can be, yet it remains fresh every time you view it. Why? Well, the first reason is Marty-- the “everyman”. Marty McFly gets introduced as an all-around basic teenager. He goes to school late, has a girlfriend he hangs around with constantly, and plays guitar in a band that no one likes. He’s kind of a loser. This quality is further cemented when we meet his family. His father, George McFly, is a weak car salesman who still gets pushed around by Biff, his high-school bully, in his 40s. Marty’s mother is a depressed alcoholic who believes she’s wasted her life by marrying George and becoming a housewife. Marty’s older brother is working at Burger King, and his older sister has never been in a relationship. The McFlys are losers, and Marty was on a directionless path. That being said, Marty’s life is not abnormal, and that’s what makes his eventual arc into becoming the “cool-guy” hero so appealing.
While the screenplay for “Back to the Future” utilizes all the perfect action film devices, what catapults this film to the top of my list for greatest action movies is its use of time and the different trends that defined the eras. The selling point of “Back to the Future” is the different times that Marty and his scientist friend Emmett “Doc” Brown find themselves traveling to. In the original, Marty and Doc travel from the year 1985 to 1955 back to 1985. The sequel finds the duo traveling from 1985 into the future to 2015 back to an alternate version of 1985 then to 1955. The final film follows a similar arc with Marty going from 1955 to 1885 and finally returning to 1985 for good. Although this seems confusing, the movies never make the timelines or the science behind it hard to understand.
Even more so, staples of the movies like the Delorean, which is used as the time-traveling machine. Or the flux capacitor, which allows time travel to be possible, have entered the vocabularies of fans of the film and the recognisability of the made-up props in the film like the Mattel hoverboards and the Nike power-lacing sneakers (released in 2015 as the Nike MAG) propelled the “Back to the Future” trilogy as one of the zeniths of American pop culture.
These films are oozing with 80s easter eggs that might have looked dated 35 years later in any other film. Since the movies did not focus on those props as relics of its time, but a look into the future, they are timeless. The “2015” constructed in the second film, of course, was not the 2015 that we actually experienced, but the world that was crafted was so believable that we might see that version of 2015 come to fruition in the decades to come.
The combination of all these aspects make great storytelling. I laud “Back to the Future” for being the perfect action film as good storytelling goes beyond the screenplay. The way the trilogy forged a bond of relatability between the characters and the audience is not common within the genre. Marty McFly, the more or less basic, loser teenager, is a role that a lot of us can fit. The actual worlds that the film created within each era visited by the duo felt real and fresh even today, 35 years after the release of the first movie. All these aspects help to propel “Back to the Future” to the top rankings of the greats of film and filmmaking.
