But I’ve had a chat now with a couple of people younger than me, for such people exist, and both struggled to wrap their head around the fact critics were snippy about the movie. Now: it’s nothing unusual for a film that’s gone on to be much loved to have been, er, ‘less-liked’ by critics, and ordinarily I’d think nothing of it. I’ve long wiped the VHS, but someone has thoughtfully uploaded his review here…
I distinctly remember recording Film 89 with Barry Norman to see what he thought of the movie in the week leading up to its release. In fact, I’d worked that out before I saw it. But the young me was then suitably astonished to discover that other people – whisper it – were not as keen.
I say this as someone who queued for nearly an hour to get into see it on its opening weekend on a drizzly Saturday afternoon in Birmingham, and pretty much loved every frame. One of those predictions of the future absolutely wasn’t seemingly everyone having the same idea for an article when the year finally rolled around, mind, but the fact that they did is testament to the ongoing impact of the movie.Īnother prediction the movie inevitably didn’t make was the fact that over the course of the same period of time, people would have warmed a lot more to the film than they did when it first arrived. The much-loved sequel, after all, spends around the first third of its running time in a version of 2015 as seen through eyes then looking some 25 years into the future.
On January 1 st 2015, it felt like half the internet suddenly put an article live examining the future predictions made in the 1989 movie Back To The Future Part II. As much loved as Back To The Future Part II is now, that wasn’t always so: we look back to its initially underwhelming response from some quarters.