Time is now to go 'Back to the Future'

The sci-fi comedy, in theaters for its 40th anniversary, was also genius social satire.

- AMY NICHOLSON FILM CRITIC

Universal Pictures.

MARTY McFly (Michael J. Fox, right), with Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), never notices the decay of the 1980s as he time travels - but the movie does.

"Back to the Future" deserves to be endlessly rewound.

Shot for shot, line for line, it’s the modern era’s zippiest comedy about the collapse of the American dream, with a sting that would have had its forefathers Frank Capra and Preston Sturges cheering: How the dickens did Robert Zemeckis get away with that?

And I’m not even talking about the sequel where the bullying mogul Biff Tannen turns downtown Hill Valley into a hellish Pleasure Paradise Casino & Hotel. All of the franchise's social satire is right there in the 1985 original, which returns to theaters this week to mark its 40th anniversary. "Back to the Future" just might be Hollywood’s richest, cleverest blockbuster — and its attention to detail deserves to be re-celebrated.

Zemeckis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bob Gale, must have been as much of a madman savant as Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown to compress so much plot into every frame. “Back to the Future” opens with a traveling shot of Doc’s garage apartment that tells the inventor's entire riches-to-rags life story, from the incineration of the Brown family mansion to his decision to sell off his 435-acre inheritance to developers who behaved only a bit better than Biff, before the camera circles down to his humble twin bed littered with past due bills and garbage from the Burger King next door, serving Whoppers on what was once his front lawn.