Back in time: "Back to the Future Part II"

There's a glitch in the reissue continuum. Rather than 1985's hardy perennial Back to the Future, this year we're getting its 1989 sequel, Back to the Future Part II, to mark what has been claimed as Back to the Future Day. (October 21, if you're being scientific, though the celebrations apparently continue in cinemas throughout this week.) Robert Zemeckis's first movie was the enduring what-if about a boy going back in time to encounter his own parents when they were his age, working from one of the most satisfying screenplays of its decade. Film two, the one with a Sharper Image catalogue where a finished script probably should have been, has hoverboards, power laces and a still remarkable amount of product-placement in its opening half-hour; it does that recognisably Hollywood thing of assuming, not entirely without logic or reason, that the future would have a lot more heavily branded stuff going on everywhere you look, some of which now strikes the eye as surprisingly far out for a mainstream studio endeavour of the late 1980s. A computerised Ronnie Reagan duelling with the Ayatollah Khomeini as greeters in an Eighties-themed restaurant; a big billboard inviting consumers to Surf Vietnam; a future-world Crispin Glover (Jeffrey Weissman) aged up and hanging from the ceiling. The first movie was identifiably Spielbergian in its emphasis on light, magic and the family unit. The second, for at least its opening half, owes a greater debt to the Tim Burton of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, its narrative seemingly secondary to or a pretext for offbeam spectacle. You have to dig some way beneath all the noodling and doodling to get to the piffling plot, which nobody remembers, about Marty McFly trying to save his deadbeat kids; the first film piloted in reverse, in other words, such that it eventually begins to cover the same ground from a marginally different angle. Part II ultimately proves to be less about the future than it is about the past, as flagged early on when the elder Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) notes "there's something very familiar about this". Postmodernism means never apologising for repeating yourself.

Still, lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place, especially in Tinseltown. The sequel has one major saving grace, the Michael J. Fox-Christopher Lloyd partnership, caught working overtime to sell us on the exposition required to get this machine up in the air again, and then keep it running. It also has a surfeit of ideas, some of which are worked through altogether better than others. These include the vaguely Voltairean notion of a growing philosophical split between our heroes, Fox's Marty wanting to use the time machine to get rich, Lloyd's Doc proposing a more comprehensive study of humanity, "perhaps even an answer to that universal question 'why?'" (What is a DeLorean for? What are sequels for?) There's a clear element of It's a Wonderful Life, that all-American touchstone, obliging Marty to negotiate multiple realities to get where he's headed; there's also far more evidence to support the argument that Biff is Trump, the bully who just won't go away, opening a casino on Hill Valley's main street and letting everywhere else go to hell. If nothing else, it's of historical note as one of the first studio movies to realise the development of string theory partly excuses any script or movie that takes the form of a big old jumble: Zemeckis throws in clips from Clint Eastwood films, a Michael Jackson cameo, flying cars, Hawaiian shirts, six different plots, five different delineations of each of the main characters, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a shaggy dog who represents the whole tale, and really just the thinnest connecting material. At 104 minutes, it certainly moves, even if it never fully coheres into anything as substantial as its predecessor, and amid all its chicanery, it may be damning that the best stuff here is the simplest: Biff throwing the kids' ball onto the roof, George throwing his punch (again), any time Alan Silvestri's score strikes up. The third film, heavily trailed in Part II's closing moments, would offer more consistent pleasures - being a better standalone film, and a better Back to the Future sequel - but this one's far weirder and livelier than this viewer recalled.

Back to the Future Part II is now showing in cinemas nationwide.