If the rousing strains of a Danny Elfman theme didn’t make it clear, if the image of a jagged batlike aircraft in the sky didn’t do the trick, the sight of Michael Keaton back in black rubber should: The Flash, the long-delayed superhero extravaganza that raced into multiplexes this weekend, operates in the long shadow of an iconic predecessor, one of the first major comic-book movies, Tim Burton’s original Batman. Yet it’s a different hit from 1989, one that opened just a few months after Burton’s, that really looms over this contemporary blockbuster. Through the time travel of callback and influence, The Flash goes back to Back to the Future Part II.
Not the first Back to the Future, mind you. The sequel — that era-jumping rollercoaster ride that Robert Zemeckis delivered four years later, following up his charming Eighties touchstone with a more feverish, less resonant entertainment. The Flash makes direct reference to the Michael J. Fox franchise in its dialogue, even using a clever in-joke to clue Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) to the fact that he’s seriously fucked up the timeline: In this new version of reality, Eric Stoltz held onto the role of Marty McFly. The gag is a lampshade, meant to acknowledge how much Barry’s bumbles through time — jumping to different years, turning the present a new shade of dystopian dark thanks to his changes to the past — mirror the hash Marty made of history in his second temporal misadventure.
For a sequel that was rather roundly received as inferior, a failure to recapture the magic of its predecessor, Back to the Future Part II has proved surprisingly influential on a new generation of event pictures. Two weeks before The Flash, audiences could catch glimmers of it in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which similarly chases a more relatively grounded sci-fi story with a lot of convoluted reality-hopping, a bleak alternate version of its high school hero’s status quo, and a “to be continued…” ending.
There are major traces of it in earlier multiplex fare, too. When Avengers: Endgame used time travel to insert heroes into the events of the first Avengers, wasn’t it taking a cue from Part II, in which Zemeckis famously cut Fox into unused footage from the first film? Likewise, didn’t the Terminator franchise follow a similar playbook with Genisys, intersecting the plot of another Eighties original? Even the Happy Death Day series took a detour into McFly’s timeline revisions, showing its work with a namecheck.
Part of the reason Back to the Future Part II has endured beyond its initial commercial success and critical disappointment is that it turned out to be unusually prescient. Many of the technological advances imagined for its depiction of the distant future of 2015 later came to pass. Companies are still chasing the dream of hoverboards — a bit of imaginary product placement that clearly had a profound effect on the consumer imagination. There was that business about the Chicago Cubs, who nearly fulfilled their destiny to win it all on the exact day that Marty dropped into the future. And of course, there’s the unfortunate prophecy of Biff Tannen, whose rise to power in an alternate 1985 would come to mirror the political mess made by the fatcat that the filmmakers modeled him on, Donald Trump.
The sequel sent unexpected aftershocks through the movie industry, too. It was the first instance of Hollywood shooting major blockbusters back to back, with Zemeckis beginning production on the much-less-influential Back to the Future Part III a mere three weeks after filming wrapped on Part II. Since then, consecutive franchise productions have become more commonplace; multiple installments in the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, Hunger Games, Avengers, and of course Avatar series would be made at the same time. Zemeckis, always on the cutting edge of movie technology, here anticipated a future where studios would line up their grand franchise plans years in advance.
In a related way, Part II also helped popularize the trend of cutting big-screen adventures cleanly in half — of closing on a blatant cliffhanger. George Lucas had gotten there first, of course. But the inconclusive, downer denouement of The Empire Strikes Back still qualifies as an ending of sorts, a punctuation on its particular episode of a larger saga. With Back to the Future Part II, Hollywood said you don’t need a resolution at all. You can just leave the audience on the hook, forced to buy a ticket a few months later to see how the story they’ve been watching will wrap up. We’re now living in a future where that’s a dismayingly common tactic: Stay tuned, over the next year, for the exciting conclusions to Dune and the Spider-Verse saga.
In a more general sense, Back to the Future Part II proved that there was no Hollywood hit too modest and human in scale that it couldn’t be flattened into a proverbial amusement park. The original, which hinged on Marty playing matchmaker to his folks to ensure his existential survival, remains an ingenious bit of magical realism — a comedy built on the what-if scenario of getting to meet your parents long before they were your parents. The sequel has no such thematic aspirations. It’s all wild plot mechanics all the time — more of a machine than that souped-up DeLorean, designed only to slingshot Marty from 1985 to 2015 back to 1985 and on to 1955 again. It moves so fast, you barely have time to register how essentially empty it is. And in its loopy plotting, you can see a blueprint for every Hollywood sequel that mistakes bigger and faster for better, that streamlines the more modest pleasures of a popular movie into pure spectacle.
Which isn’t to say there’s not a certain gee-whiz fun to be had from Back to the Future Part II, at least for those who can get a kick out of its Heinlein-by-way-of-Amblin convolutions. The final act, at least, is a nifty magic trick maybe only Zemeckis could pull off: In splicing a second Michael J. Fox into Back to the Future, it doubled down on the don’t-muck-with-the-past stakes, creating a bunch of setpieces that hinged, precariously, on preserving the events of a previous movie. There’s a reason The Flash and Endgame and others have followed its lead.
But maybe those time-travel hijinks were a prophetic vision, too — and the secret to this divisive sequel’s staying power. In the age of the legacy sequel, Hollywood now treats every iconic hit of the past, and maybe especially of the Eighties, like a sacred object to be referenced and revisited. Sequels have become their own form of time travel, taking audiences back to the start: You watch a movie like Top Gun: Maverick to get echoes of the hallowed past, to bask in the glow of twinkling nostalgia. In that way, Back to the Future Part II keyed into the legacy-sequel spirit early, by literally dropping audiences into actual footage from a movie they already loved. No wonder this movie lives on; it saw the future Hollywood would find in perpetually going back.
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June 18, 2023 at 09:00PM
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‘Back to the Future Part II’ Changed the Course of Hollywood History - Rolling Stone
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