Let’s be honest. You have already seen Back to the Future Part II and you think it’s the worst of the trilogy. [Oh, hey now! – Ed.] It doesn’t have the novelty of the first movie and it doesn’t have the awesome Wild West setting of the third. It doesn’t even have the coolest Hoverboard scene in the trilogy. But it does have the single best line of any of the movies:

Marty: Hey Doc you better back up we don’t have enough road to get up to 88
Doc: Roads? Where we're going, we don't need (melodramatic flick of futuristic sunglasses) roads.

Back to the Future belongs in the category of family friendly sci-fi (or FFSF as I like to call it) and follows the adventures of Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and Doctor Emmet Brown (Christopher Lloyd) as they bumble through time. And I do mean bumble. Despite having a time machine, our dynamic duo are never in control. This is normally the result of the peculiar requirements to get the time machine running: the flux capacitor (don’t ask) needs 1.21 jigawatts of electricity and the DeLorean which houses the flux capacitor must be travelling at 88 miles per hour (142 kilometres per hour for us metric types). So in the first movie it’s the lack of jigawatts which causes the problem (only solved with a handily placed lightning strike) and in the third movie it’s the 88 miles per hour when the DeLorean runs out of petrol in the Wild West (solved in a quite fantastic train sequence).

But the second movie follows a different course. Doc and Marty travel from present to future to alternate present to past to present volitionally. They are still somewhat bumbling around – the purpose of their second and subsequent jumps is to put right mistakes made while they’re in the future.

Hm, that sounds confusing. Why don’t I explain? Back to the Future II starts with all the crap things in Marty’s life still being fixed from his good work in the first movie. Luckier still for him is that his girlfriend has gotten an upgrade in the break between films to the delightful Elisabeth Shue (whom everyone should remember as the unlikely genius physicist opposite Val Kilmer in The Saint). They’re about to head off for some much needed time alone when the Doc appears out of nowhere in his time machine saying they need to go to the future to stop their kids from ending up in jail. Naturally. While in the future, Marty buys a Sports Almanac with all the sporting results from 1950 to 2000, with the idea of gambling his way to a life filled with expensive hookers and top-notch blow. Doc talks him out of it, they throw the almanac away, another character – that damnable bully, Biff -- gets it, goes back to the past to give it to his old self and the old self gets super-rich, killing Marty’s dad and marrying his mum in the process. This is obviously a situation that no self-respecting time traveller can endure so Marty and Doc set about fixing it.

I’m not sure that clarified anything. See the point is that this movie is even more convoluted than your average time travelling tale, though it does make slightly more sense than any of the Austin Powers movies. Where the other Back to the Future movies spend most of the movie in one era, Part II jumps repeatedly through time and loses in the process all the signature anachronisms, like Marty’s mum trying to kiss him in 1955 or the doc creating a house-sized contraption just to make an ice-cube in 1855.

So Part II is really the action movie of the trilogy, it moves quickly from time to time with no slowdown. The others are more languid and evoke a much stronger sense of place and time despite, or maybe because they don’t show quite so many times and places. Part II is a great and necessary part of the trilogy (three identically-styled movies would be tedious) which makes it a must-watch but when you’re looking for a fix of the best Back to the Future action, stick to the others.

  -- Brad Crammond