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Path: utzoo!linus!gatech!ut-sally!kelvin
From: kelvin@ut-sally.UUCP (Kelvin Thompson)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: _Back_to_the_Future_  (spoiler)
Message-ID: <2706@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 18-Aug-85 21:01:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.2706
Posted: Sun Aug 18 21:01:43 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Aug-85 01:09:09 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 45


                          _Back_to_the_Future_
 
                           by Kelvin Thompson
 
 _Back_to_the_Future_ is a bad, confused movie.  If there are any doubts
 that Hollywood is still rife with drug abuse, this movie can lay them to
 rest.
 
 The movie seems to concern a middle-class high school student, Charles J.
 Fox (_Sixteen_Candles_, _The_Breakfast_Club_, _Weird_Science_), and a mad
 scientist, Christopher Lloyd (_Foul_Play_, _Caddyshack_, _Fletch_).  The
 two go for a ride in the scientist's DeLorean sports car, and then the
 student gets in trouble with his parents.  Or something like that -- the
 movie is so chaotic that the viewer finds it difficult to figure out
 exactly *what* is going on.
 
 For example, one moment Fox is driving around in a parking lot, then the
 viewer turns to his girlfriend to talk about dinner plans and looks up to
 find the student staring at a farmer in the middle of nowhere.  Later,
 when the viewer returns to his seat with some hot dogs and popcorn, he
 sees a strange, seemingly incestuous conversation between Fox and his
 mother (maybe his sister?).  Still later, after the viewer has moved to a
 better seat, Fox is in a concert hall playing electric guitar, even
 though he was banned from the concert early in the film.  And all through
 the movie, whenever the viewer looks up from trying to quiet the baby he
 is sitting, he notices all sorts of inconsistent details: the town square
 looks completely different in different scenes; the same people will
 sometimes drive recent-model sedans and later drive dated jalopies; and
 characters' ages and relationships to one another seem to shift randomly.
 
 The only conclusion the viewer can draw is that _Future_ is the most
 drugged-out movie since _Caddyshack_.  The screenwriter must have been on
 hallucinogens to produce such an incomprehensible plot.  Many of the
 actors must have been strung out or nearing the D-T's to have looked so
 bad in some of their scenes.  Even the film editor and director must have
 been on mind-deadening substances to have assembled some of the scenes so
 obviously out of order.
 
 The producer of _Future_, Steven Spielberg (_The_Godfather_,
 _Apocalypse_Now_, _One_From_The_Heart_) has built a reputation as one of
 the "cleanest" filmmakers in Hollywood, but this incoherent, uneven movie
 shows that even he has succumbed to the terrible drug dependency that
 continues to ravage Hollywood.