Getting into deep water with Back to the Future

Over the last few months I’ve sneaked into these pages a few not-so-veiled references to one of my favourite films, Back to the Future, each one vaguely justifiable at the time.

This week, as a new book is released which celebrates the 25th anniversary of the time travel classic, I can finally devote a full column to one of the most entertaining movies ever committed to celluloid.

For those of us who remember being taken to the cinema to see Back to the Future on its original release – it arrived on UK shores on 4 December 1985 and I was nine-years-old at the time – the film was a thing of wonder.

Backed by a PR campaign which employed Huey Lewis and the News to provide the radio-friendly title song, the film was funny, exciting and had a cool car in the shape of the DeLorean, at a time when KITT from Knight Rider was still the best thing on four wheels.

The new BFI Film Classics book, simply titled Back to the Future, is clearly written by fans of the film, but as well as recalling moments such as the DeLorean hitting 88mph and the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, it also touches on some of the political issues addressed in the script, particularly attitudes to teen culture of the 1950s and 1980s and its representation of science, atomic power and time travel.

It also reveals that in 2007, Back to the Future was chosen by the United States Library of Congress to be preserved for all time in the National Film Registry thanks to it being ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically’ significant.

Bizarrely (or perhaps not given the anniversary I mentioned earlier), a new time travel film is about to be released in the UK which references Back to the Future, at least in some respects.

John Cusack, a man who will be forever linked to the 1980s, leads the cast of Hot Tub Time Machine (out 7 May), in which four friends travel back to that decade from the present and are forced to try and preserve the past, though perhaps not in quite the same way as Marty and Doc Brown.

It sounds like a fitting tribute to a movie which shaped many people’s view of science fiction, making it accessible to a mass audience and paving the way for two ingenious sequels.