If a sequel to Back to the Future were to be announced there would be a huge gasp across the movie loving world which would be a combination of ‘this is the most exciting thing ever’ and also ‘please don’t ruin my childhood’.
The Back to the Future trilogy is so loved that even the creators of the film have said they would do everything they can to stop the studio from making a sequel. Maybe a sequel could have come out in the 90s or even the early 00s, but we’re now at the stage where it’s seen as something that could never live up to expectations. That doesn’t mean this writer cannot dream of the possibilities.
If you’ve never seen the movies, the basic premise of the first one is that a teenage boy called Marty has befriended an ageing scientist, Doc Brown, who has invented time travel. Through an unfortunate series of events Marty ends up stuck 30 years in the past to 1955 where he has inadvertently changed time and is on course to have prevented his own existence by stopping his parents from becoming involved.
Marty is also lacking the nuclear fuel needed to power the time machine to get him back to his own time. This leads him to seek the help of the younger Doc Brown to devise a plan to get home.
I won’t describe the whole plot, but can say that by the time the credits roll Marty has succeeded in getting his parents together and saving his existence whilst also managing to get back to 1985 which was the year he came from. It’s a great movie which is a fun adventure and other than a few plot holes and questions which are inevitable with every time travel based story the movie wraps up fairly neatly without the specific need of a sequel to continue the story.
The film does end with a tease of the characters going forwards into the future, and it’s exactly here where Back to the Future part 2 picks up. The first sequel is an interesting film in that after the opening half hour showing us a vision of the distant future of 2015, and a few minutes showing us how altering time can lead to bad things, the plot actually takes us back to within the plot of the first film in 1955. The remainder of the film plays out within the events of the original film and this close connection between the first two films really justify why the sequel is called Back to the Future Part 2 rather than just Back to the Future 2. It is a second part to the same story, and unlike the first film, the filmmakers were confident enough to end the film with a definite cliffhanger to set up a part 3.
Back to the Future part 3 is interesting in that it is infinitely more stand alone and disconnected from the first two. I would argue that it would be possible to watch Part 3 without watching the first two films, but I would say that it’d be crazy to attempt to watch part 2 without having already seen part 1. Part 3 gives us a western style film complete with cowboys, gun fights and horse riding.
The plot of part 3 simplifies things to the same premise of the original – Marty must go back in time to save a life – this time Doc Brown’s rather than his own, and once again they have to solve that the time machine is lacking fuel – although this time it’s simple gasoline rather than the much sexier nuclear plutonium.
And unlike the end of Part 1 which teased the possibility of more adventures and Part 2 which had an absolute unresolved cliffhanger, Part 3 had a fairly conclusive ending. The DeLorean was destroyed by a train seemingly leaving Doc Brown trapped in the past, only for Doc to show up with a new steam powered train time machine. Clearly a few years have passed for Doc to be able to build a new time machine, and during that time the Doc and his now wife Clara have had two children, giving Doc a happy ending. Marty meanwhile has his happy ending looking towards the future with Jennifer. Done. No need for a sequel right? Well…
In the 30 years since Back to the Future Part 3 we have had a cartoon series where the Doc’s twin boys Jules and Verne were primary characters, so in this sense we had a sequel, and whilst these may be seen as non canon for the film series, they actually give us a good indication of what the sequel could be. A new generation of Doc’s children taking centre stage who have to do something to ensure the safety of the future. It could even go down a similar route as the first film, where the boys cause their own existence to be in jeopardy.
A retread of the the story beats of the first film could be a safe bet, as all three films in the original trilogy reused themes and lines from sequel to sequel. A forth film in the series wouldn’t be Back to the Future if we didn’t get lines such as ‘Mom, is that you?’ and ‘Nobody calls me chicken’.
