More Travels with Marty

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BACK TO THE FUTURE, PART II Directed by Robert Zemeckis; Screenplay by Bob Gale

Time travel is the thinking person's UFO, an improbability that nevertheless resonates with mysterious and sometimes marvelous possibilities. But it has become a rather tired topic. It is almost as hard nowadays to create fictional vehicles capable of reawakening childhood reveries about zapping through the years as it is to invent a scientific instrument actually able to journey up and down the old continuum.

All the more remarkable then that the director-writer team of Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale has created, in the space of just four years, two terrific movies on this subject. Like its predecessor, Back to the Future, Part II does not merely warp time; it twists it, shakes it and stands it on its ear. But as before, the film's technical brilliance is the least of its appeals. Satirically acute, intricately structured and deftly paced, it is at heart stout, good and untainted by easy sentiment.

Future II opens with a deceptively simple errand to run. Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) wheels up to Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in that lovable time machine (a goofily customized DeLorean) with bad news: Marty's son -- not yet even a gleam in his father's eye -- is in trouble in the year 2015, and there is just enough time to save him from a life of crime. The dauntless duo, accompanied, of course, by Marty's girlfriend Jennifer (Elizabeth Shue), must head off to give future history a quick fix.

The world they find is not entirely disagreeable: shoelaces tie themselves; the criminal-justice system works efficiently because lawyers have been eliminated; the Chicago Cubs have finally won the World Series. Young McFly's salvation, though it requires a certain strenuousness, is quite simply accomplished. On the other hand, the personal future that Marty and Jennifer discover is not what they dreamed it would be. Something has gone quite nastily wrong.

That brutal jerk Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) -- he who almost destroyed Marty's parents' lives in 1955, and from whom Marty rescued them in the earlier film -- has survived into the 21st century too. What's worse, on their voyage into the future Marty and Doc unwittingly provide him with the means to construct a dark alternate history beginning in 1955. Over its course, Biff has managed to turn pleasant little Hill Valley, Calif., into a hellish variant of Las Vegas, with himself as its czar. He has even contrived to make Marty's mother a widow and marry her, turning her into an alcoholic and Marty into an abused stepson.

Doc and Marty have no choice. They must return again to the scene of their first intervention in history, that high school dance that climaxed Future I. All along this story line, Marty has been encountering variations on himself, his progenitors and heirs. But when he is reinserted into this moment in time and starts to meet himself and the situations of the previous movie, Back to the Future II ceases to be a sequel. It becomes instead a kind of fugue, brilliantly varying and expanding on previously stated themes. And it accomplishes this while retaining its powerful narrative drive and its infectious geniality.

< Coming right after Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was equally rich in invention and astonishment, the movie establishes him as today's most exciting young director. And makes next summer, when the concluding episode in this saga will be released, a season to anticipate.