BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II

   Film (1989). Amblin Entertainment/Universal. Dir Robert Zemeckis, with Steven SPIELBERG among the executive prods. Starring Michael J.Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Thomas F.Wilson. Screenplay Bob Gale, based on a story by Zemeckis and Gale. 108 mins. Colour.

   Panned by many critics as a typically disappointing follow-up, in part because its plot remains unresolved at the end, this film and BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III can properly be seen as two halves of a single film, and indeed were shot simultaneously. In fact it is perhaps the most sophisticated TIME-TRAVEL film ever made; what was supposed by critics unfamiliar with the genre to be an incoherence of plot was in large part the perfectly well realized convolutions of a TIME-PARADOX tale. The story, involving Marty and Brown's trip to the future, where the older Marty is interestingly a failure and his son a potential hoodlum, is too complex for synopsis. A trip back to 1955 generates a DYSTOPIAN 1985, an ALTERNATE WORLD run by Biff, the bully of the previous film. The scenario is dark; the acting suffers from Fox's tv sit-com mannerisms and Lloyd's hamming; but the story, ambitious and intellectually complex for a popular movie, is a joy. The good aspects of the film were perhaps ahead of their time, demanding a knowledge in the audience that not enough of them had.