Doc Brown Tackles Love While Marty Conquers the West in Back to the Future III

I’ve long loved the first two Back to the Future movies, but I never got around to the third until recently. I’d heard from some that it wasn’t quite up to snuff, but I found it an enjoyable romp.

Unlike the dizzying second installment, Back to the Future III is mostly rooted in one time: the Old West. Despite Doc Emmett Brown’s (Christopher Lloyd) explicit instructions to Marty (Michael J. Fox) to destroy the time machine and not attempt to retrieve him from 1885, when the loyal teen finds out that a grisly fate awaits his eccentric friend if he doesn’t intervene, he’s compelled to hop in the time machine yet again.

In some ways, the movie is very repetitive, but then so was the second. The fun is in seeing how essentially the exact same scene can be transplanted into another time. Naturally, Biff’s surly ancestor Mad Dog (Thomas F. Wilson) is at the heart of much of the trouble. I barely recognized Wilson under his accent and outlaw get-up, though his basic mannerisms are pretty similar. Other familiar faces pop up in distant past too. I’m most amused by Marty’s principal showing up as the sheriff.

Fox doubles as his great-great grandfather, fresh-off-the-boat Seamus, which makes Lea Thompson’s presence as Marty’s great-great grandmother even more eyebrow-raising. It’s weird to see Marty’s 100-years-older twin married to a dead ringer for Marty’s mother – and why does his paternal great-great grandmother look like his mother, anyway? But it’s more fun to keep recycling the same actors, and Thompson’s phony accent annoys me less than her voice in the other installments.

This movie really isn’t about Marty, though, aside from his finally learning how to back down from a pointless challenge. Mostly, it’s about Doc falling head over heels for brainy schoolteacher Clara (Mary Steenburgen). Lloyd isn’t your typical romantic lead, and certainly not in this role, but even though Doc had always considered himself too logical and scientifically-minded to get caught up in romance, once the bug bites him, he’s as smitten as a schoolboy, and he and Clara make quite the charming couple even though the character must be about twice her age.

It’s fun for us to see Doc in this unexpected situation. Not so fun for Marty, who’s got one great shot at getting the time machine running again. If he fails, he’s likely to be stuck in the 1800s forever, so this is not a great time for Doc to be distracted.

This third installment is entertaining, with fun nods at the previous movies – like Doc and Marty using each other’s catchphrases – and at the western genre. Marty particularly has fun appropriating the name Clint Eastwood.

I don’t know why it took me so long to get there, but Back to the Future III is a journey to the past that I’d gladly take again.