Ah yes, it's the final film in everyone's favorite Michael J. Fox trilogy. I don't know where the consensus stands, but the first few times I saw the trilogy, I ranked Part II as the best movie, followed closely by the original, with III coming in a pretty distant third. Yet, today, I would struggle to call any of them better than each other - they're all very related and similar, but each is a very different story with a slightly different genre. At any rate, I've now seen the entire trilogy four or five times, and while I can't say I agree with the time-traveling logic it employs (as I rambled on and on about in my Part II recap), I can definitely call the trilogy as a whole on of the very best of all time. Each movie is exciting and humorous. What more could you ask for from a group of PG-rated blockbusters? The characters - well, really only Marty and Doc - are incredibly memorable and charismatic. Now, I really hate to do this, because the series is so great and I've already complained about it once, but I need to get some more time-traveling shit off my chest. (Spoilers, of course, ensue.) First of all... when Marty and '55 Doc discover that '85 Doc has been killed, what's the rush to go save him? Marty races back in the time machine to 1885 to prevent Doc from meeting an untimely doom. This is all nice and good and all, but my question is, what's the rush? At present (1955), Doc has been dead for 70 years! There's really no need to rush off immediately to save him. Why doesn't Marty take a breather? Perhaps go back to his present (1985) and bang his girlfriend at the lake a lot like he was planning to do? He's certainly earned it, as he's just saved himself (and the universe, in the process). Instead, the screenplay unfolds in a way that might have you believing that it's crucial to go back and get Doc before it's "too late," which of course is never the case when you have a time machine. The whole "we have no time to lose!" mentality is of course vital to action movies in general, but becomes counter-intuitive in time-traveling movies; you've always got time to lose, because you can regain any amount of time you wish to merely by traveling back in time. This isn't an issue exclusive to this trilogy by any means, but still. Here's another small nitpick; in this film (and most), it appears that when you travel through time, you re-emerge at the exact location on earth that you left from. (Consider the unfinished bridge at the movie's end that becomes finished when Marty jumps forward 100 years.) But the earth is moving rapidly around the sun, and also rotating, and also the solar system itself is rapidly rotating and revolving around the center of the galaxy, and in general the earth never really occupies the same absolute location in space. The Delorean's time traveling model uses an impossible Earth-based location system; somehow, time travelers are capable of winding up at the exact same location on Earth that they "left" from, even though those two locations on Earth at two different given times could be billions of miles away from one another. Furthermore, what happens if, I time travel into the future from any specific area, and in the future, that area is occupied by some kind of matter. A tree, a person, a building, whatever. When I suddenly "pop in" to that time period, what prevents me from being killed instantly by the fact that, I've, say, become one with another car. At the end of this movie, Marty very nearly avoids getting hit by an oncoming train. What if he had traveled forward in time to just a few moments later, right when the train was passing through the region of track which Marty appears on? How would atomic physics handle this? Suddenly, two objects are occupying the same space. I imagine things would be catastrophic at the molecular level as all kinds of materials changed their structure, alignment, and general properties to accommodate an influx of matter. Chemical reactions? An enormous electrical charge? Whatever happened, one thing's for sure: Marty, the Delorean, and the train would all be immediately disfigured and rearranged (physically), so quickly and completely, that Marty would never have known what hit him. This begs questions regarding any time travel at all, even into "open air," because even "open air" is a mixture of all kinds of molecules; they're just not as densely packed together as, say, the molecules of a train. When I time travel in the Delorean, how do I survive the inevitable fusion of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen into my own cell tissues? I'm no biochemist, but I have to believe that any such event would seriously fuck up and compromise all kinds of cell properties and functions. Alright. I'm done shitting on this fantastic series, and I feel bad for having done so. But I needed to voice all of my concerns somewhere, and since I doubt anyone would want to sit down and listen to me ramble about flaws in a twenty-year-old movie for five minutes, I decided to do so here. I hope that's okay with all three of you readers out there.
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