Back to Back to Back to the Future

From start to finish, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis's Oscar-nominated screenplay is a marvel. Its structure is an elaborately constructed concoction that winds itself as tight as it possibly can in its first half, then unleashes all of that pent-up energy in a second half that never once pauses for breath yet still manages to cram in a full musical sequence.

Marty McFly (a perfectly breezy Michael J. Fox) travels back in time to see his parents as teenagers, and then he must find a way to travel forward again. That's pretty much it, but Gale and Zemeckis build the story in such a way that everything that occurs early on serves as a setup for a payoff you might not realize is going to come later. Back to the Future sets up all the pieces on its board, then knocks them over one by one — and with great flair.

Why, for instance, is some woman pressing a flyer about fixing Hill Valley's clock tower on Marty? Well, because he'll eventually need to know exactly when lightning will strike. The movie even reveals exactly how it's going to use this constant series of setups and payoffs in its opening scene, when a long pan around time-machine inventor Doc Brown's room full of ticking clocks and misbegotten inventions ends with a shot of the case of plutonium a newscaster was talking about just a few moments prior. The way such moments are buried is so elegant that you might not even notice some of them until your fourth or fifth viewing of the film.

And Back to the Future is no slouch in the character development or world-building departments, either. Hill Valley feels like a real town, with a real history, where Marty's adventures might change the name of the mall or disrupt the carefully established status quo. Meanwhile, both Marty and his parents begin the film as seeming caricatures and gain depth as the plot moves along and we realize that the sad-sack parents Marty started out with are a far cry from the hopeful teenagers they once were.

Finally, as if all that weren't enough, Back to the Future is also a really great movie for sharp, comedic dialogue, something that few blockbusters can brag about. Yeah, by now you've probably heard all of the most famous lines too many times for them to really register, but then something like George McFly (Crispin Glover, in one of the greatest weirdo screen performances ever) demanding, "Lou, give me a milk ... [dramatic pause] ... Chocolate," sinks in, and you realize anew just how crammed full of great lines the film is.