class=”alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-46318″ title=”Back to the Future Thumb” src=”https://www.heyuguys.com/images/2010/09/Back-to-the-Future-Thumb-220×150.jpg” alt=”” width=”220″ height=”150″ />There are so many films from the 80’s that you love at the time and then wax eloquent about for years afterwards, only to find when you finally get around to watching them again that they are deeply terrible and a profound and enduring sense of shame sets in.
Back To The Future is emphatically NOT one such film. It is a stone cold, 5-star classic and I defy anyone to convince me otherwise. I am beyond thrilled that it is returning to the big screen, since I missed it first time around, only falling in love with it over the course of a steady stream of video, TV (and more recently) DVD re-watches.
There is much about BTTF that I could praise and rightly so, but I really want to write here about quotes and one-liners. When I was younger and my siblings and I all still lived at home, we used to play “guess the movie quote” around the dinner table. BTTF is ripe for such fun. I am convinced that even people entirely or at least fairly unfamiliar with the film could quote a line or two. Consider the following:-
“1.21 gigawatts”
“Great Scott!”
“Wait a minute Doc, are you saying that my mum has the hots for me?”
“Are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?”
“McFly, you’re a slacker”
“When this baby hits 88mph, you’re going to see some serious s**t”
“I’m George, George McFly. I’m your density”
“I guess you guys aren’t ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”
It is all just so iconic and indeed can be one of the hallmarks of a genuinely great film – that one line, which transports you to the film and suddenly you’re lost in it, thinking of where the line appears and what’s happening on screen at the time. When I was ten, I had no idea what a gigawatt was (the best I could do now is hazard a guess), but say to anyone “1.21 gigawatts” and if they’ve seen BTTF, I guarantee they’ll break into a smile. It’s that sort of film. It explains why we all know what a flux capacitor is and what it does and why we all laughed at that bit in The Wedding Singer when Glen’s car pulls up and the gullwing doors open.
Plenty of films have made a lasting impression on me in a hundred different ways, but there are few that make me smile as much as BTTF. Watching it is like curling up with your favourite soft pillow – you know exactly what it is going to feel like, you know it is all going to be okay and you know a happy ending awaits. And you also know you’ll be able to join in with half the dialogue as it is being spoken.
Altogether now, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need….roads”.
