Back to the Future Review

The script is the achievement, and it is close to a closed system. The flyer for the clock tower, the mall's twin pines, the amplifier that blows out, the skateboard, the gunshot on the tape recorder: each is planted casually and detonated exactly once, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for the trick. Zemeckis stages the 1955 material as a series of near-misses rather than gags, so the comedy comes from mounting pressure instead of jokes.

Michael J. Fox, recast weeks into production and shooting nights around a sitcom, plays Marty as reactive panic, which lets Christopher Lloyd take all the wild vertical energy as Doc. The film's real risk is Crispin Glover, whose George is genuinely strange rather than merely meek, and Lea Thompson gives the incest-adjacent premise a lightness that could easily have curdled. Alan Silvestri's brass turns a stunt with a cable and a clock hand into an aria. Dean Cundey's photography is bright, clean and completely subordinate to the machinery.