This post contains spoilers. This is not a review but more of a mini-analysis. I assume you’ve seen the movie. This is just my interpretation. You can watch the trailer at the end of this post. See my previous entry about the previous movies in the series:

Molecules to Movies: Back to the Future (1985)
Molecules to Movies: Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Back to the Future Part III is directed by Robert Zemeckis and stars Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Mary Steenburgen, Thomas F. Wilson and Lea Thompson.

This film begins pretty much where part 2 left off backtracking a few minutes in case anyone forgot how it ended. For movies filmed back-to-back, they could not be more different in feel and tone. Gone are the fears of changing things through interactions with parents. Instead it's like a one-off adventure in a time travel TV show where our heroes have an adventure in the Old West. It is kind of illogical. If anything, they should be even more worried about changes they make 100 year earlier as there are even more people whose lives he might interfere with.

The Plot

I'll give a quick summary. You've seen this already, right? In 1955, the 1985 Doc Brown has accidentally traveled back in time to 1885, when Hill Valley was part of the Old West. Marty and 1955 Doc Brown retrieve the long buried Delorean from a cave. Marty discovers Doc Brown's grave. He was shot and killed by Buford Tannen not long after arriving in 1885. Marty travels back in time to try to save him. Doc saves Clara from a historical death, changing history. A love story between them follows. Doc and Marty use a train engine to get the Delorean up to 88 mph, which send Marty back to 1985. Doc and Clara the show up on a time traveling train, along with their two children.

This is almost a parody of a Western movie. Marty is clad in colorful dress. This stands in greater contrast to a dirty filthy Buford Tannen (from whom Biff is descended). It sort of satirizes the Old West but Blazing Saddles already did that better. Like part 2, Michael J. Fox plays more than one role. This time he plays Marty's great-great-grandfather, named Seamus McFly. Lea Thompson plays Seamus' wife, Maggie.

Marty has two traits that appear in both these sequels but are not really present in the original:

1. He is a master marksman, learning to shoot guns by playing video games.
2. Nobody is allowed to call him "chicken."

He demonstrates his gun skills first on an 80's video game in part 2. In this film, he does it again by playing a shooting game at a festival. Marty gets upset when Griff calls him chicken in part 2, and again in this film when Buford calls him yella'. In part 2, his 2015 self is convinced to commit a crime after Needles calls him chicken. In this, film it's revealed that it was Needles who got him injured in a car race, after calling him chicken. But he changes his mind about racing at the end of the film. It is an odd bit of writing as it makes it even more apparent that these were written together, much differently from his character traits in the original. Along with the absence of Crispin Glover, these are just a couple things that distances the sequels, making them not so memorable for some fans. As much as I love the 2015 and alternate 1985 sequences, I think the films go downhill once they revisit 1955 with too many unnecessary but brief callbacks to the original.

The action sequences do get better later in the series, even if the storyline may have been more exciting in the original. The hoverboard and car scene in part 2 is exciting and the train scene at the end of part 3 is as good as those in many Westerns. There is a definite influence from Buster Keaton's The General, which practically invented the art of depicting action on a moving train.

One place the film departs from the previous films is in Doc Brown's evolution of thought on interfering with history. His saving Clara altered history. She calls it destiny. Doc thinks of the time machine as causing nothing but disaster, despite his saving her life. Like any good love story, our hero Doc is conflicted. His emotions are at odds with his principles.

Of course, Doc Brown was also supposed to die in this timeline, before Marty decided to save him. Perhaps Doc and Clara are both ghosts in a way. It is only natural that they would continue as time travelers. In a sense they have entered eternity together. The world even believes they are dead, having both apparently died when the train fell over the cliff. This parts from the other two films in exploring this issue of visiting the dead through time travel. Other than in alternate 1985, all the main characters were alive in the 3 time periods from the first two films. This film's plot begins with Marty time traveling expressly to visit a man who has already died. He is essentially resurrecting Doc Brown from the dead.

The original dealt with what can happen when someone causes the potential negation of their own existence. The plot centered on Marty nearly causing his parents not to meet, meaning he would never be born. If they don't meet, and he isn't born, was "Calvin Klein" merely a ghost? Are all time travelers ghosts then? Wouldn't we say that about any apparition that occurs after the time they died? Consequentially, aren't they essentially the same if living before their time?

I'll be quite honest. I've never liked this film. But after taking the time to write down these thoughts, I think I slightly appreciate it more. It's still not nearly as good as the original.

Oh, what does the train run on? I believe it runs on steem!