I will take any excuse to think or talk about Back to the Future, so seeing this post on the Guardian last week was another excuse to bring up the topic of my favourite movies. The premise of the article is just a revisit of the film trilogy on its 40th anniversary, recapping the history of it but also bringing it into context a little bit.

It is arguably a perfect film, without a duff note or a scene out of place, a fantastic parable as endlessly watchable as It’s a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day. It also, inevitably, reflects the preoccupations of its day. An early sequence features Libyan terrorists from the era of Muammar Gaddafi, a caricature wisely dropped from a stage musical adaptation. In one scene the young George McFly turns peeping tom as he spies on Lorraine getting undressed.

Also, people always talk about the ‘mum getting crush on son’ aspect of it but no one ever seems horrified that Biff is literally seconds away from raping Lorraine after a sustained campaign of harassment, and no one seemingly prepared to do anything about it. But still, it is an almost perfect film and you don’t need me to wax lyrical about it.

Talking of Lorraine, Lea Thompson who plays her is quoted in the article:

If you made Back to the Future in 2025 and they went back 30 years, it would be 1995 and nothing would look that different. The phones would be different but it wouldn’t be like the strange difference between the 80s and the 50s and how different the world was.

This has blown my mind a little bit. You need it to be a 30 year-ish gap to be able to have the ‘meddling in your parents life plot’ but she’s so right that 1995 wouldn’t really be all that different… apart from the excellent pop music, obviously.

And thinking the other way, when the film was made in 1985, and they thought forward to 2015, they thought it was going to be radically changed because of how quickly things had moved on over the previous decades. But the difference between 2015 and 2025, for example, is minuscule, and I can’t see another twenty years moving the needle much.

Not only is this an incredible film (trilogy), a wonderful cast, a great story and a time travel classic, it also happened at exactly the right time and wouldn’t have worked if it was any earlier or any later. How amazing for this all to have come together perfectly to make a movie that is the soundtrack to my life. If anything, I love it even more now.