REWIND REVIEW: Back To The Future (1985)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on November 13, 2025.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: Robert Zemeckis.

Cast: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, Thomas F. Wilson.

"Seatbelts? Where we're going we don't need seatbelts."

Unlike other monumental films of my childhood, I don't remember the first time I watched Back To The Future. It was one of a handful of movies we had pirated on VHS, so it was in high rotation in my house in the late '80s. I don't remember a time before Back To The Future. It was just always there. 

But I distinctly remember buying a book at Target on the making of the trilogy when I was 11. This was my first foray into learning about how a movie was made. It was the moment where the curtain was pulled back, and what I saw behind the silver screen proved just as compelling as what was on it.

And I've still got it.

Even today, the behind-the-scenes story of Back To The Future is a compelling study in persistence and adaptation. I'm still fascinated by the huge changes made to the story and the production. It's a great "kill your darlings" example in cinema - few ideas were sacrosanct during the writing of the script, with each alteration becoming an improvement.

The time machine went from being a fridge to a Delorean, Marty McFly went from being a video pirate to a student who dreams of being a rock star, and the climax involving a nuclear explosion turned into an iconic combination of lightning and clock tower. Even during filming, changes were made in search of perfection - Eric Stoltz was replaced by Fox a month and a half into production.

The results are incredible, and so much of it has become iconic. The DeLorean, 88 miles per hour, "1.21 gigawatts!", Marty McFly playing Johnny B. Goode, the title, the lightning striking the clock, two streaks of flaming tyre marks, the flux capacitor, and a common understanding of how time travel works - all these things are cultural touchstones now. They're references understood by millions. Many films wish they could be even half this iconic.

And at its heart - the unchanging thing among all the changes and zeitgeisty moments - is a comedy with a slightly cartoonish sense of humour delivering a now-classic high concept: "what if you went back in time and met your parents?". 

Joanna Berry, writing in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, pins the film's success down to "an extremely clever premise... further enlivened by quick-fire direction from Robert Zemeckis and a superb, witty script" from Zemeckis and Bob Gale. Zemeckis and Gale were also clever enough to aim the movie at anyone and everyone, whether they be nine or 90.

In declaring it the best film of the '80s, Consequence's Michael Roffman pushed that wide appeal notion further. "Back To The Future is so many things to so many different people. It’s a brilliant comedy, it’s a sentimental love story, it’s a tale of remarkable triumph, it’s a stylish sci-fi adventure, it’s a perverted commentary on the American nuclear family, it’s a haunting parable on the spoils of Reaganomics," he wrote, only half-joking about the last one.

However you come at it, it's the quintessential time travel film. Back To The Future is about how our choices shape us, how we can be the masters of our own destinies, and how the way we live our lives ripples out to those around us. Marty McFly's haphazard butterfly effects are played for laughs (Twin Pines Mall becomes Lone Pine Mall after he crashes into a tree in the DeLorean) as well as being the heart, soul and plot of the film. He transforms his mother and father from alcoholic and dweeb respectively to white-picket-fence capitalist/Reaganomic success story, and turns his dad's bully into a helpful servant. It's ultimate wish fulfilment - we wish our lives worked out how we wanted, so what if we had a second chance to make that happen? It's the core of almost every time travel movie, and few do it better than Back To The Future.

Perhaps the most fascinating character in all this is Marty's mum Lorraine (Thompson). She is revealed as a far more complex person than her son (or we the audience) suspected. As a teen, she lusts, she breaks rules, she falls in love with the wrong person (her son!). Lorraine figuring out her destiny becomes a key tenet of the film - it's basically the driving narrative that everything else fits around. Marty's arc is even defined by Lorraine - by film's end he understands his parents and everything they went through a lot better, which is essentially his biggest personal growth in the film.

And then there's Rick and Morty, sorry, Doc and Marty. Fox and Lloyd's pairing is inspired, as is Zemeckis' direction of their performances. There are moments of subtlety, but the cartoonish air Fox and Lloyd bring at Zemeckis' urging really sells the comedy, without feeling off. As Fox explained in that aforementioned "making of" book I bought aged 11, "(Zemeckis) has, at times, asked me to do enormously exaggerated moves and facial contortions that go against every instinct I have as an actor".

But the results speak for themselves. Lloyd and Fox deliver fantastic comedic performances that have defined their careers. 

And despite Zemeckis having Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Death Becomes Her and Romancing The Stone next to his name, this is greatest film.

While it's hard to pinpoint films influenced by Back To The Future, its legacy and importance is evident. In 2007, the United States Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry, and it appears regularly on greatest-of-all-time film lists, especially those voted for by the public. And at the time of writing, it was still in the 75 top grossing films of all time when adjusted for inflation, and #101 in my totally scientific and completely infallible mega-list of the greatest films of all time.

While it sucks to think we live 10 years beyond the future Doc and Marty visited in the under-appreciated Back To The Future II, at least it's good to know that 40 years of from their first outing, Back To The Future remains a timeless classic. 

AFI #66: Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because when I started, the damned cinemas are closed and I had to review something, and now I can't stop.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: Steven Spielberg.

Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott.

The eyes of the idol really followed you around the room.

Every Saturday, back when I was about 10 years old, my brother and I walked up the dusty dirt road we lived on to our neighbours' house, parked ourselves in front of the TV with the other kids, and watched a VHS tape of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. We did this for so many Saturdays I lost count.

This weekend ritual would be followed by all the adventures I could muster in my imagine - the hay shed became an ancient temple, a copse of trees became a perilous journey over molten lava, four-wheel motorbikes became the location for rolling battles with imaginary Nazis.

Before I understood what "cinema" was as an artform, before I understood movies, before I understood film as something to study and devour and drown in, I understood that Raiders Of The Lost Ark was the greatest movie of all time.

It's certainly my favourite movie of all time, so reviewing it is absurdly difficult. To me, it's the perfect film, and its clearly visible flaws only add to its perfection. 

But watching it for the umpteenth time, this time with my underwhelmed nine-year-old, I was struck by how beautiful it looked. 

Just look at this shot:

Or the composition and use of shadow here:

And here:

Or even this shot, in the midst of a fight scene:

This is Spielberg and his cinematographer Douglas Slocombe taking what could've been a mere pastiche of '50s adventures films and treating it like the pure cinema it deserved to be treated as. 

And then there are the scenes, each one iconic, one after the other. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan has said his job was basically to link the set pieces together - from the booby-trapped resting place of the fallen idol to the Nepalese bar-room brawl, from the discovery of the Ark to the escape from the snake-filled Well of Souls, from the fist fight with added propellers to going under the truck, all leading to the face-melting conclusion. It's the very definition of "rollicking adventure".

Kasdan is selling himself short though. We definitely remember the action, but the bits in between are glorious. Perhaps the best is the scene where the MacGuffin gets introduced via a careful conversation between Indy, Marcus and two military men. It's wonderfully measured at first, before it hints at something unnerving - we learn about the Staff of Ra and the Ark of the Covenant in a clinical fashion, but we get a strong sense of foreboding as they discuss Hitler and "the power of God". We also get to see another side to Indy. He's a learned scholar, with a healthy yet respectful dose of skepticism, rendered beautifully by Ford. 

Which brings us to the not-so-secret weapon of Raiders. Harrison Ford was already a star, his face on a million lunchboxes as Han Solo, but Indy made him an icon, a legend, and the goddamn GOAT. The way he effortlessly flips from lopsided smile and "I don't know - I'm making this up as I go" nonchalance to teeth-gritted glare is under-rated. Ford sells the moments of "are you seeing this shit?" dumb luck just as much as he sells complexity of his relationship with Marion (Allen). It's this ability to flick from comedy to drama at the drop of a fedora that helped make him such a star.

Allen's no slouch in this either, keeping up with Ford every step of the way. The script subverts the damsel in distress trope just as often as it leans into it, and Allen hits every moment in that complicated journey. Her star would never shine as bright again as it did in Raiders, but her imprint on this film is indelible and vital.

I could go on and on about all the things that make Raiders so incredible, but again, I realise the futility in trying to separate my critique from my own nostalgia. Watching it spirits me back to my childhood every time. It returns me to a tree-climbing innocence, when there was nothing more incredible than a stuntman sliding under a moving vehicle, and punching Nazis in the face was the right thing to do, and  Raiders was the greatest movie of all time.

And some things never change. Punching Nazis in the face is still the right thing to do, and Raiders is still the greatest movie of all time.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on October 30, 2025.

(M) ★★★

Director: Scott Cooper.

Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Gaby Hoffmann, David Krumholtz.

"I will now perform Down With The Sickness, in the key of F."

It's weird to be bored by a film that you suspect you should really love.

But that's the feeling I had for large parts of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a film about the making of the Springsteen album I know best, and the only one I've ever purchased - his dark 1982 opus Nebraska, an album that saw him take a deliberate step back from the spotlight and that was ultimately recorded at home on a four-track.

Given the subject matter we see in the film, I will absolutely hunt down a copy of the book it's based on, and would gladly watch the same stuff presented as a documentary. But as a film, Deliver Me From Nowhere drags and wanders through nearly two hours of Springsteen battling with his inner demons in the quest for pure creativity in a way that is surpisingly unengaging.

This exploration of The Boss fighting his Black Dog is sporadically interesting but far from enthralling on the whole, partly because it's often hard to differentiate his depression from him being a diva. 

And maybe that's the point. Certainly, by film's end my perspective on the story and the character of Springsteen had changed, and I felt a strong desire to watch the film again through that lens, now better understanding what Springsteen was actually grappling with.

So maybe I'm just an idiot that didn't get it. Or maybe the film doesn't deliver it well enough, leaving me bored, despite being fascinated by the making of this album. 

Either way, White's performance as Springsteen is excellent. He doesn't necessarily look like the New Jersey icon (and he's obviously not playing guitar all the time in the film), but he captures the intensity and power required for the role. 

Strong is also good as Springsteen's trusted manager Jon Landau, who is a fascinating character on his own. Landau serves as something of an audience surrogate - his confusion mirrors the audience's own, as we try to grapple with what the hell is going on with Springsteen. This does mean Strong's given some painfully clunky lines at times, especially in some hamfisted scenes where Landau talks at his wife about Springsteen. This need to have Landau explain things seems proof that the material isn't selling itself well enough.

The film is at its best when Springsteen is grappling with his past, as manifested by his parents (played by Graham and Hoffmann). The complexities of this relationship prove more engaging than Springsteen's creative wranglings, or an unfulfilling subplot about his relationship with a young single mum (played by Young).

Deliver Me From Nowhere is solid proof of the notion some subject matter is better suited to certain media. In book or doco form, this material would likely sing. But as a biopic it's an underwhelming cry in the dark that only hits the right notes on occasion.