This is one of those movies that surprises you – or at least it did me. Quite frankly, I don’t even remember why it was that we watched it. Perhaps it was a suggestion from a friend. But whatever the reason, we decided that we’d sit down with the family and see if it was any good. In the end, we were glad that we did.
It definitely starts off a bit slowly – in the not-to-distant future, Noah (Chris O’Neil) and his sister Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) going through some toys such as stuffed animals, trying to find something to do with them. It’s really a scene that most parents today might see at any point in any life. But then something a bit unusual happens.
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I’m really a bit of a sucker for any apocalyptic tale. Perhaps the fact is that I just know we’re done for one of these days anyway, or maybe I’d like to hear the tale of the underdog who manages to scrape through in such circumstances. Then again, maybe I feel like I’ll never have the chance to experience the Old West, and it’s about as close as I might get – though it would be at the expense of a great deal of our society to get there. Not saying that I’m the one who’d be able to save the world or anything. I just find the stories more interesting than a Utopian future is all.
Nonetheless, this one focuses mostly on a generally reluctant hero – Theo Faron (the typically under-rated Clive Owen), thrust into the role of bringing the world back from the brink of destruction when he becomes the protector of a pregnant woman. This is significant because she is the first such instance in years, and while a single pregnancy may not save the world, it does offer some amount of hope.
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Doctor Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) has turned up dead, and it seems that the most likely suspect is the one being who can’t be a suspect at all. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that the law clearly states that murder has happened when one human kills another human, which leads directly to the second reason. The suspect isn’t human. It’s a robot. And according to the Three Laws, a robot should not be able to kill a human, which means that there shouldn’t be anything to investigate – even if the law were to apply here (which it doesn’t).
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In the not-so-distant future, the problems of the world’s energy crisis have been solved by the New Economic Block (NEB). Or so it would seem. For once the mining begins, a massive radioactive cloud is released, and that would appear to be problematic. Do you produce a teaspoon of this wonder-fuel, at the cost of lives, or do you stop and look for something else? I suspect you already know the answer.
If you’re the NEB, you continue mining, and do what you can to offset the radiation. But if you’re the rest of the civilized people, you try and stop the NEB, and so war breaks out on Sirius 6B, and in 2078, this war has been going on for some 20 years between the two factions, all of which used to be a part of the NEB. But now, it’s been six months since anyone has heard from the NEB, until one day a lone soldier comes in from the dessert bearing a message…
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When Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) receives the hundred-year-old telegram from Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) at the end of Back to the Future Part 2, telling him that he’s alive and well in the Old West, it also has another tidbit of information – that he’s hidden the time machine in an old cave outside of town. But Marty needs some help getting it running.
So he returns to town just in time to see himself leave to go back to the future for the first time, and he surprises the original Doc (the 1955 Doc), and tells him all about what’s happening. Or at least, enough so that he doesn’t know anything about his future, because Marty doesn’t know that Doc has read the note that he gave him, telling him about the terrorists in the original Back to the Future.
With Doc on board, he gets some help getting the DeLorean back up and running, and using the Mr. Fusion to generate the power, Marty heads back to 1885 to see if he can rescue Doc and head back to 1985 – which will hopefully be the same as they left it!
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This movie starts what is perhaps the classic time-travel trilogy. While it is definitely not the most serious of films, that may be what is most charming about it. The fact that Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a high-school kid from California, can jump in a car in order to save himself from Libyan terrorists may seem dated now, but in 1985 when the movie came out? This was classic cinema. Okay, that might be a bit over-the-top, even then. But what makes the movie is that it’s fun to watch.
Marty is friends with Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and Marty receives an invitation to meet Doc at the mall one night to help film a science experiment. When he gets there, he finds that Doc has turned a DeLorean into a time machine, and a somewhat surprised Marty watches as Doc sends Einstein (Doc’s dog) through time in the car. It all goes awry when the Libyans show up to demand their uranium back. I mean this is good stuff!
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In the not-so-distant future, it seems that one of the last frontiers of travel has been broken. An enterprising (greedy) soul has discovered a scientist who has uncovered the secret to time travel, and he has developed a plan for marketing it to ultra-wealthy clients, bored with their mundane existence. There are two problems with this plan.
The first is that government, as they are likely to do, gets involved in regulating what he does. The second is that the potential for catastrophe is great. But being a greedy capitalist, Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) proceeds anyway, and disaster seems the likely outcome. Unless, of course, the loner scientist who has his own noble goals for working for Hatton can save the world. What do you think will happen?
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Terl (John Travolta) is a Psychlo, one of a race of giant, evil, greedy, beings that have taken over the Earth in the year 3000.
He is also something of an outcast among his own race, which is why he has been stuck in the backwaters, ruling over the dump that is the Earth. But he has a plan to make things worthwhile, for he has determined that the planet contains plenty of gold, and he believes that the man-animals can be trained to help him get it, without any other Psychlos knowing about it. With his fabulous new wealth, he can regain a place of prominence on Psychlo and get off of this rock. But this greed will also be his undoing.
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Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) returns in this sequal to the 1985 smash Back to the Future.
Though four years have elapsed since the original, little has changed in the movie, and in fact it starts right where the first one left off – in the driveway of Marty’s house, right after Doc (Christopher Lloyd) has dropped him off after their adventures in time.
The only major difference is that Jennifer, Marty’s girlfriend, is no longer played by Claudia Wells – instead, Elisabeth Shue takes over.
Other than that, it’s pretty much business as usual – except that Doc has returned from the future, and he’s got some bad news. It seems that Marty’s kids (and Jennifer’s – they are married in the future) are getting into trouble, and they need to make sure that they can save them. Thus begins the second episode of the trilogy. What happens when they get there sets the stage not only for this installment, but the next one as well.
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Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) starts his day off like every other day – get up, get dressed, find out that he’s eating too much of this or that and that he can’t get bacon and has to eat something that he doesn’t want. Then he has to find out that he can’t find the answers to his questions, which no one else seems to have. They just seem to be fine with going through their lives, why is it that he is different? And he has these dreams about boats and things that come into his head.
The world that Lincoln lives in is self-contained. It has to be, since the outside world is contaminated. Every once in a while, a survivor is pulled in from the outside, and they have to help to train them to do even the most basic of tasks. Yet still, even years later, these people keep coming in. Where are all these survivors coming from? How do they continue to survive, without being overcome by the contamination? Why does no one know? Why does no one care?
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