Monster Movie of the Week: Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)

GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE (1989)

Director: Kazuki Omori

Genre: Daikaiju eiga

Country: Japan

After the Showa series ran its course with 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla, the Godzilla franchise went on a long hiatus until 1984’s relaunch, Godzilla (known here as Godzilla 1985). The movie was praised for its return to the darker themes of the early films but was criticized for its often ponderous tone and its lack of a monster opponent for the Big G. It would be another five years before the new Heisei, or versus series, would resume in earnest with Godzilla vs. Biollante, a movie that is notable for its remarkably unique and imaginative creature design, introduction of new “hard” science fiction elements, and often bizarre plot.

Biollante begins in the aftermath of the previous movie, as scientists are sifting through the rubble of Godzilla’s most recent attack on Tokyo and pulling out bits of the monster’s biological material from the debris. Godzilla vs. Biollante introduces a element into the series through its biotech subplot. In the Showa movies, Godzilla’s biology had not been given much attention, but in the 1990’s and 2000’s it is a recurring theme. In the 1980’s, the use and ethics of biotechnology and genetics was a huge issue. Biollante was actually released the same year as Michael Crichton’s landmark sci-fi novel, Jurassic Park, which also featured the application of biotech as one of its main themes.

Much of the human activity in the movie concerns the quest to obtain and use the Godzilla cell samples by different factions. This is actually kind of a cool idea, and if there had been a Godzilla attack, you can bet that lots of people would like to get their hands on his samples to use for their own ends. Researcher Dr. Shiragami, mourns the loss of his young daughter in a terrorist attack and spends much of his time looking into psychic phenomena, especially the psychic properties of roses (Um, whaaa?). One of his students is Miki Saegusa, a psychic who develops a bond with Godzilla. Miki becomes a fixture in the later Heisei movies, which feature a fairly tight continuity.

Meanwhile, Dr. Shiragami has come into possession of some Godzilla cells and has been tasked with using them to create a weapon to be used against Godzilla. Unbeknownst to his employers, Shiragami has been combining them with both the DNA of one of his psychic roses and that of his dead daughter (WTF?!), needless to say this does not end up well, and the resulting creature, Biollante, escapes into a nearby lake and grows to an enormous size. Biollante is a genetic relative of Godzilla and begins calling him to her. When the King of the Monsters arrives, the two have a skirmish, and Biollante is apparently defeated.

Godzilla then makes his way to the nearest nuclear power plant (as is his wont) he faces an all out attack from the humans, who unsuccessfully attempt to use Shiragami’s weapon against him. A fully-grown Biollante also appears, and battles Godzilla, nearly destroying him, before he triumphs and heads to sea. Biollante releases spores which briefly form into an image of Shiragami’s daughter and then head out into space(!?).

THE MONSTER/EFFECTS

First, Biollante features a new look for Godzilla and one that stayed fairly consistent throughout the 1990’s. The Biollante suit remains an iconic look for the character and one that is beloved by many fans. Strangely, it adds features that are actually less reptilian, such as a set of mammalian specialized teeth instead of the fangs or jagged teeth of past suits, an almost feline face, topped with what look like cornrows, and small, intelligent eyes. Apparently, this Goji has been doing push-ups, because he has a more muscular upper body, with pronounced pectorals and deltoids (the lower body is still flabby though).

The real star, however, is Biollante herself, who is totally unique in the history Godzilla monsters. This is the rare instance of Toho forgoing the usual man-in-suit technique and opting for a different approach to bring its monster to life. Biollante, in her final form, looks like a giant Audrey 2 from Hell and actually dwarfs Godzilla in comparison. She is a genuinely horrible monster and not at all goofy-looking, as many other Toho monsters are. Her “body” is sort of bulbous with a luminescent potbelly, crisscrossed with sinewy vines . She moves on a bed of tentacle-like vines, many of which end in toothy jaws. On her back are mossy scales. Half of her body is taken up by an absolutely huge and croc-like mouth, which is full of teeth, even on the base and roof of the mouth, and from which she sprays a radioactive sap. She is definitely one of the most original and compelling monsters to have appeared in a Toho movie.

As a Toho monster, Biollante is part of a long line Godzilla clones, demi-Godzillas, usurpers, and wanna-bes that include, the original Mechagodzilla, Spacegodzilla, and Orga (from Godzilla 2000). Even the American Godzilla has been worked into the mythos as a pretender with his reference in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah and finally his appearance in Godzilla Final Wars. In GMK, poor Baragon, is temporarily confused with Godzilla and it doesn’t end well for him. If there is a real theme to the Godzilla franchise, is that there can only ever be one Godzilla, and you’d better not even try to replace him.

MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE

The battle at the end is quite good, and represents a rare moment where Goji is truly outmatched by an opponent.

SEQUELS

Followed by the also interesting, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah.

Sadly, this is Biollante’s sole appearance in a Godzilla movie. She does appear in the recent Wii game, Godzilla Unleashed as a playable character. And Shiragami appears in the cutscenes as well.

HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

In the DVD and Bluray age, Godzilla vs. Biollante has been pretty much unavailable in the USA. With no official DVD release, it is necessary to order it as an import or wait for the movie’s eventual release on Bluray. As of yet, only the very first Godzilla has been released on Bluray and the 1998 remake. If Toho and Columbia follow suit with what they did last time, you can expect most of the catalog to be released on Bluray with the new American movie in 2012.

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Patrick Garone

www.patrickgarone.com

twitter.com/patrickgarone

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Monster Movie of the Week: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Director: Ted Post

Genre: Science Fiction

THE MOVIE

The shocking twist ending of Planet of the Apes didn't exactly loan itself to a sequel but that didn't stop the powers that be at Fox from churning one out and creating a "franchise" that would set the stage later film series like Star Wars. The Apes sequels are a pretty diverse lot and, truth be told, it is one of the weakest and least original entries to the series. The first half of the movie is basically a retread of Planet of the Apes and the latter half is a bizarre visit to the remains of New York City and the psychic mutants which inhabit it.

Charlton Heston was not hot on doing a sequel but was talked into appearing so long as his role was scaled back to a cameo and his character Taylor was killed off at the end. The movie begins at the iconic conclusion of POTA and we follow Taylor and Nova into the Forbidden Zone where they come across some strange phenomena. Heston's character disappears and the rest of the movie is a search for him. To replace the Taylor character the writers came up with Brent, portrayed by mini-Heston, James Franciscus. Brent is an astronaut sent in search of Taylor who, improbably, passes through the same freak time warp which ensnared the crew of Taylor's ship.

While the first movie had some serious socio-political themes embedded into the story, in Beneath they seem a little forced and superficial. The Ape society as depicted in Beneath is highly divided between the chimpanzee "intellectuals" and the militaristic gorillas lead by the new character, General Ursus. Ursus seeks to lead a gorilla squad into the Forbidden Zone to confront the mysterious forces that have been observed there and any humans that they may encounter because, "the only good human, is a dead human." This whole subplot is a pretty ham-handed commentary on the Vietnam war, complete with chimpanzee peace protesters. The political angle in Beneath the Planet of the Apes lacks the wit and cleverness of the original.

Ursus, is the first in a long line of warrior gorillas in the movies. Even the Tim Burton remake carried on this tradition. In the original movie, however, the gorillas were depicted as laborers.

What is present in the sequel is a rather weird and subversive commentary on religion. There are two belief systems present in the movie: that of the apes, who worship a long dead messianic figure that they refer to as The Lawgiver and that of the mutants who worship a super-powerful doomsday missile. The religion of the apes is presented as a superficial and ineffective control system (Ursus barely tolerates sitting through a service) while the beliefs of the mutants presented as absurd and perverse.

Preparing for services at Our Lady of Perpetual Nuclear Destruction.

The other important point in talking about Beneath is the ending, in which Taylor blows up da earf, continuing/establishing a tradition in the Planet of the Apes movies for shocking or downbeat endings. I suppose there is no way to top the amazing ending of the first movie (although Tim Burton tried) so the writers just decided to go for destructive finality. Plus Heston wanted to have his character killed off. It is a pretty shocking ending, but one that is in character for the misanthropic Taylor. The funny thing is that there is not even music over the credits, just silence. I can imagine the slack-jawed, horrified reactions of audience members when the movie played in the 1970's: ominous silence, and then the sound of little boys afraid to cry. No wonder the next movie was a gentle fish-out-of-water comedy (well, with a shocking and traumatic ending).

But first you may want to catch a show while you are in town with the Ben Nye Dancers.

THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS

Sequels often operate under the economic principal of diminishing returns, that is each successive installment will bring in less money than it's predecessor. This is not really the case these days, unless you are talking about a series that is purely a money-making enterprise. Apes was a pioneering franchise that paved the way for all of the trilogies and sequels that would pop up in the '80's and beyond. Unfortunately, the producers of these movies were still operating under the old fashioned idea that each movie would make less and less money, and therefore should cost less to make. In Beneath, you can really see this in the decline in quality in the makeup. While the main characters, Cornelius, Zera, Zaius and Ursus, are given decent treatments, many of the background-and not-so-background-apes are given awful pullover masks with unarticulated mouths like something from Troll 2.

Ursus and Zaius even have a steam bath scene (!?) in which both actors wear some really bad full body monkey costumes. This is a pretty strong argument for keeping things concealed. No one was clamoring to see Dr. Zaius without his shirt on.

A lot of attention was payed to the newly introduced mutant characters who wear rubber masks to conceal their skinless faces. The mutants are irradiated humans who have developed psychic powers including telepathy, the ability to mind control humans to produce visions. These guys have some cool make up to give them that "invisible man" effect but are otherwise kind of goofy.

MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE

Beneath the Planet of the Apes features some impressive sets. There is a great scene in the middle of the movie where Brent stumbles upon the ruins of a New York subway station. The last third of the movie is set among these dilapidated urban underground settings.

SEQUELS

Escape From Planet of the Apes

HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

Widely available in a variety of really good formats. Can usually be found in one of the many Apes boxed sets, the best of which is the exhaustive Bluray set, which is complete with a book and an interactive documentary. The DVD set is quite good also.

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Patrick Garone

www.patrickgarone.com

twitter.com/patrickgarone

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Monster Movie of the Week: Gorgo (1961)

Like nothing you've ever seen before...unless you've seen Godzilla. Or King Kong. Or Mothra. Or Gamera.

Gorgo (1961)
Directed by Eugene Lourie
Genre: Anglo Kaiju

In the swinging '60's, every country had to have their own giant monster. Japan had Godzilla and co., Korea had Younggary, and America was frequently overrun by irradiated insects and spiders. Not to be outdone, En-guh-land came up with its own homegrown giant monster movie, Gorgo. Gorgo has all the elements of 1960's kaiju cinema: a giant monster, minature sets, landmarks destroyed, a kaiju single parent, military battles and even an annoying little kid.

Gorgo went on to start his own Skiffle band.

In Gorgo, an earthquake awakens a giant prehistoric reptile that has been slumbering off the Irish coast. When it comes ashore, it is subdued and transported to London to be shown off to the public by some people who have obviously never watched King Kong. They are also unaware of The Grendel Rule of British Monsters, which states that all British monsters have bigger more vicious mothers waiting in the wings. Kaiju-licious mama Gorgo comes to London in search of her son, and also enjoys some of the sites and attractions of the British capital. By "enjoy," I mean "goes all blitzkrieg on."

In Britain in the '60's, you could be a sex symbol and still have bad teeth. It didn't matter.

THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS

Compared to the contemporary Japanese giant monster movies, the effects in Gorgo are pretty crude. This is particularly true of the minature work, which lacks the detail of the Japanese kaiju movies. It is interesting to note that Gorgo really features two scales: what we find out to be the infant Gorgo is about thirty feet tall and there are sets scaled to him and then there is the more traditionally gigantic scale for mama Gorgo.

The creature design is pretty unimaginative, Gorgo is typical of the upright vaguely saurian monsters we have seen a million times in giant monster cinema. Gorgo has some little finlike appendages on either side of her head that highlight her aquatic roots and give her a bit of a Nessy vibe. I'm surprised they didn't try to tie her more into the many legends of lake monsters that spring from Great Britain. She also has some big mitt-like hands, unlike the rather fine pianist fingers of Godzilla.

SEQUELS

None.

MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT

This movie gets the Golden Meh Award.

HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

On DVD, and available on Netflix.

TRAILER

Patrick Garone
www.patrickgarone.com
twitter.com/patrickgarone
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Monster Movie of the Week: The Fly (1958)

The Fly
Director: Kurt Neumann
Genre: Horror


THE MOVIE

Based on the short story of the same name, the original version of The Fly is a decidedly different experience than its more famous remake. The 1958 movie features classic horror icon Vincent Price, and the story unfolds as a murder mystery, instead of the body horror/love story of the 1986 David Cronenberg movie. The movie is set in Montreal, (making both this and the remake Canadian-set) and there is a lot of Quebecois flavor throughout, which is a little confusing at first.

When a local scientist is found brutally murdered in an industrial press, his wife becomes the sole suspect. She refuses to reveal what she knows, instead she is obsessed with locating a strange white-headed fly that has been seen around her home. Her brother-in-law and the local police investigator are tasked with finding out what happened, which is finally revealed in a lengthy flashback. The scientist had invented a teleportation device, which he decided to try on himself but when a common housefly flew into the chamber, he and the fly ended up swapping heads and arms. In order to reverse the condition, he must locate the aberrant fly and go through the teleporter one more time.

Framing the movie as a kind of detective story was a nice touch, which allows the audience to peel back the mystery of The Fly a little bit at a time, as opposed to the more direct approach taken by Cronenberg, which allowed us a more intimate look at the characters. I imagine for someone watching the movie, not knowing anything about the story, The Fly would be a wild, weird ride. Also, the presence of the smaller fly/hybrid is a horrific little subplot that is not found in the remake. One has to wonder, to what extent can the poor creature reason. We don't see it until the movie's most famous shot at the end, in which the tiny screaming human-faced creature is devoured by a spider.

THE CREATURE/EFFECTS

This version of the creature does not feature the full genetic transformation that was featured in the 1986 movie, instead we see a man with a giant fly head and an insect arm. The head is actually pretty effective and realistic, covered in black hair and with a quivering proboscis and multifaceted eyes. The total effect is fairly revolting.



This scientist has neatly traded heads and limbs with the fly and doesn't really undergo any kind of transformation, except perhaps a mental one. We see him late in the movie, losing the ability to write and think, shades of Jeff Goldblum's performance two decades later. The actor playing the scientist, David Hedison, does some very nice work physicalizing the creature, with erratic jerky body language.



MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT

I really like the scenes late in the movie when Dr. Delambre really starts to really loose it. He begins having difficulty hanging on to his humanity. In these scenes lay the seeds for tragic horror of the remake.


SEQUELS

Return of the Fly 1959, and Curse of the Fly 1965

HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

DVD and currently streaming on Netflix.

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Patrick Garone
www.patrickgarone.com
twitter.com/patrickgarone
facebook.com/cityofthegodsnovel

Making Concessions

My very first job was working concessions at the old Lincoln Village movie theater on the North Side of Chicago. It was a theater where I had seen many many movies (from Batman to JFK). It was the summer of 1994 and I had just graduated from high school and it was a busy summer for movies. My brief time there covered The Lion King, Speed, and The Mask, into the fall of Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption and Interview with the Vampire. It was a fairly old cinema, with an aged 1970's aesthetic. It was somewhere between the shiny new shopping mall-looking theaters and the beautiful old movie palaces like the Nortown. It had a history. Hundreds of thousands of people sat in darkened theaters watching movies there during its time, sharing stories and letting their imaginations run free.

These days, going to the movies has become a pretty awful experience. The ticket prices are outrageous, the cinemas lack personality, and the concession experience has become a miserable DIY activity. Gone are the days when you can ask for extra salt or butter in the middle of your bag of popcorn. You are given a bag and sent to a side station where there is a butter pump and a container of table salt. Actual popcorn salt is available for sale behind the concession stand. Yes, you are expected to buy it and apparently carry it in some kind of movie kit every time you go out to the show. Nachos come with a small, sealed, container of cheese. Pretzels are puffy limp things that come in weird nondescript plastic bags of humidity. Salt is available on request.

I've been busy doing some headwork for a writing project that involves reconstructing a stretch of the Rogers Park neighborhood, circa 1980. It involves a different kind of archeology than the type than the type with which I am usually preoccupied. A landmark of that neighborhood during my childhood was the great Adelphi theater, where I saw Return of the Jedi about 20 times when I was a kid. It was torn down several years ago. I went to visit its former location today, only to find a still-empty lot. I miss good movie theaters. I feel bad that I took places like the Adelphi, the Nortown, and even the Lincoln Village for granted while they were still around.


Patrick Garone
www.patrickgarone.com
twitter.com/patrickgarone
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Monster Movie of the Week: Monsters (2010)

MONSTERS (2010)
Director: Gareth Edwards
Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama


With recent movies like Children of Men, District 9 and Moon, we seem to be having something of a renaissance in thoughtful social problem sci-fi . Now we have director Gareth Edwards' Monsters, which, while not as good as those movies, offers up a Mexican-set giant monster story which has roots in the current political situation between the US and its southern neighbor. While a lot of the political commentary is in the background of the movie, it is clearly extrapolated from real world current events and the (US-caused) alien monster outbreak in Mexico is cleverly layered over existing issues like illegal immigration and the War on Drugs. With a huge chunk of Mexico considered an "Infected Zone" in the movie, American conservatives finally got to build a massive militarized wall along the border, and, ironically, two Americans have to be smuggled to it.


The focus of Monsters is heavily on the relationship between the two lead characters: the daughter of a wealthy family who is stranded in Mexico and a photojournalist who is tasked with bringing her back to the US. It is really more of a quiet character-driven indie road movie than the orgy of action and special effects you might expect from the title . I've grown fond of calling it Lost in Monstration for its foreign setting and the weird quasi-romantic relationship at its core.

Monsters is a gorgeous-looking movie and it captures the particular beauty of Mexico, here often in ruins. The vivid Latin American color palette is muted with smoke and rubble. The movie presents us with a haunting apocalyptic vision contrasting ruined urban landscapes filled with architectural skeletons and jungles dotted with Mayan ruins and abandoned military hardware.

For a movie that gets a lot of mileage out its Mexican setting, Monsters makes some inexplicable mistakes about the country's basic geography. When the characters finally reach the US border near the end of the movie, they find the terrain covered in jungle and peppered with Mayan pyramids, which would more accurately be Mexico's border with Guatemala to the south. Anyone who has ever been to the arid American southwest will have a good idea what the US border would look like. C'mon, guys, look that shit up.

THE MONSTER/EFFECTS

The movie handles its creatures in an interesting way. For most of movie, the monsters are either referred to, glimpsed in Cloverfield-like video clips, or seen in illustrations and photos, which is in keeping with the movie's emphasis on its human protagonists. The monsters are handled in a way that is refreshingly casual, instead of reverential. The movie is not trying to knock you over the head with CGI. As in Cloverfield, the creatures are kept mysterious, except for the fact that they crashed to Mexico on some sort of NASA sample return mission which immediately overran a large chunk of Mexico, the "Infected Zone."

Once we finally see them, they are somewhat of a letdown, though. While an octopus is a great starting point for an alien creature-the tentacles, the slimness, the soft boneless body-the aliens of Monster look a little too much like octopi. Other than their size, bio-luminescence, and their ability to walk on their tentacles, they are pretty much Space Octopi. Maybe they are from the Mon Calamari system. It is unimaginative creature design and somewhat of a letdown after being teased for the whole movie. But again, Monsters is not really about monsters.




HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

Currently in select theaters and available On Demand.

SEE ALSO

Cloverfield 2008, District 9 2009

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Patrick Garone
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Top 10 Time Travel Movies

I'm a sucker for a good time travel story and with the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Back to the Future movies, and the talk of the supposed cell-phone-using time traveler at the premiere of a Charlie Chaplan movie in the 1920's, people have been talking a lot about Time Travel of late.

Obviously someone who has discovered the secret of time travel would be talking on a modern cellphone.

In fact, I'm just going to call it, November is National Time Travel Month. To celebrate this prestigious event, you can go to one of those nerdy Time Travel Reception parties where people wait around for people from the future to show up...but seriously, if I had a time machine, I would already know that that party sucked without having to go. Instead, I am going to count down my favorite Time Travel Movies

No, Borg, attempting to change the past is futile.

10. Star Trek: First Contact

Star Trek is absolutely rife with time travel stories. In fact, there is an entire DVD boxed set of nothing but time travel episodes from the various series (and that’s still not all of them).

The miracle of Time Travel allows T. J. Hooker to meet A Man Called Hawk.

First Contact was not even the first Star Trek feature to deal with time travel (that would be Star Trek IV) but First Contact features elements of both The Terminator (the Borg get a hare-brained idea to travel back to the past to assimilate humanity and prevent First Contact with the Vulcans) and Back to the Future (Riker and his team must engineer events on the ground to make sure that the future takes its course), in a fun and action packed story filled with high stakes temporal paradoxes.

Hermione, why don't we hang onto this thing?

9. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

You don’t usually find time travel in fantasy movies like Harry Potter, but late in Prisoner of Azkaban we learn that young Hermione Granger has been using a magical device in order to be able to double up on her class load (seriously). Towards the end of the movie, Hermione and Harry use the device to double back on events that had already transpired. The time travel elements are very well-done and we realize that they were present in the movie before we even knew that Harry and Hermione were going to go back in time, creating a very clever and logical temporal loop. Azkaban is one of the few movies that does time travel right.

Strangely, this very useful device disappears after this movie, when it might have REALLY come in handy.

8. Déjà Vu

Denzel Washington stars in this tightly-plotted thriller in which a cop uses an experimental device that allows limited interaction with the past in order to investigate and, later, prevent a terrorist attack on New Orleans. The movie keeps it’s time travel elements small and “realistic” and for a time travel movie, Déjà Vu actually feels credible.

7. Star Trek

2009’s Star Trek beautifully illustrates one of the often ignored Golden Rules of time travel: travel to the past will likely create an alternate universe. The movie begins early in the continuity established by all of the previous movies and shows, but when a 24^th century Romulan ship arrives on the scene at almost the same moment that Kirk is born, a new alternate future is created and the Star Trek series is cleverly rebooted. It’s only logical.

6. Time Crimes

This Spanish thriller is one of those pleasantly confusing time travel movies that layers paradox on top of paradox almost to the point of absurdity and shows the complications of making repeated trips to the past in a confined geographical area. Time Crimes illustrates the other Golden Rule of time travel: If you travel to the past and DO NOT create an alternate universe, then all of your actions in the past will have been part of the present all along (see Prisoner of Azkaban). This movie is really good, check it out if you haven’t seen it.

5. Terminator

Terminator is great and problematic time travel movie. In a post apocalyptic future, machines have taken over the planet and fight bands of human rebels. When the humans finally achieve victory, the machines launch a desperate gambit: sent a cyborg back in time to kill the human leader’s mother so that he is never born. Of course, if he is never born, then there would be no need to send a terminator back in time to kill him…and so on.

Unless, Skynet was trying to seed the past with Terminator technology, to hasten its own creation in an alternate universe. But seriously, most of us are too busy worrying about what happens in our own universe to have time to think about others (see Fringe). Perhaps Skynet was looking to set up franchises in alternate dimensions. Like Starbucks.

4. Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is more of a Temporal Anomaly movie, than a time travel movie. In this 1992 comedy, Bill Murray plays a man who is caught in some kind of time loop, and forced to repeat the same day over and over again until he gets it right. Groundhog Day is more concerned with comedy than science but its premise is intriguing and was even “borrowed” for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. By the second half of the movie, Groundhog Day becomes a kind of cause and effect character lab as Murray repeatedly interacts with the characters in this small town until he finally figures out how to be happy.

3. Back to the Future

Back to the Future is the granddaddy of time travel comedies and just a great movie all around. 1980’s teenager Marty McFly gets accidentally sent back to 1955, where he prevents his parents from meeting and falling in love and endangers his own existence. After putting things right, he returns to his home to find his family changed for the better (?). While undoubtedly a classic, the time travel elements of the movie are a little goofy, due to a contrived temporal paradox, that Marty measures with a fading photograph of his family.

But let’s get real, Marty’s existence is in no real danger in Back to the Future. If we are to buy that there is a single universe paradox, then Marty’s trip to the past becomes part of established history and he was always meant to go back in time and help his parents get together. If this had been the case, Marty would have come back to the exact same family situation that he had left: his father a spineless nerd and his mother an unhappy drunk.

Instead, Marty comes back to a new douchey parallel 1985, in which his father is a rich and successful novelist who has hired his wife’s attempted rapist, Biff, to work as a manservant. No doubt, this new 1985 would have been different in countless ways for poor Marty. He might never have felt truly at home. It also begs the question, what happened to that future’s Marty McFly? And what about Marty’s poor family from his original timeline? To them, Marty simply would have vanished in the Twin Pines Mall parking lot during a botched terrorist attack. Tragic. But, again, no one cares about people in alternate universes.

Bite their shiny metal asses.

2. Futurama: Bender's Big Score

The first and best of the Futurama direct-to-DVD movies, Bender’s Big Score is a wild time travel romp that visits the past, present and future of this sci-fi animated series from The Simpsons creator Matt Groening. Always up-to-no-good robot Bender makes use of a time machine to steal precious artifacts from the past and soon creates a paradox that involves Fry and Leela, and even revisits the opening moments of the series in a funny riff on The Terminator.

1. Back to the Future, Part II

So, let’s get one thing out of the way, Back to the Future, Part II is nowhere near as good a movie as the original. In fact, one could make an argument that BTTF II is not so much a movie in its own right as it is a supplement to Back to the Future. People have criticized it for lacking the charm and the heart of the original movie, which is fair. But no other movie out there is as concerned with the actual time travel as this movie, which deals with the complications from time travel gone awry and Marty and Doc's attempt's to fix the past. The movie is so dizzyingly plotted that Doc Brown has to actually bust out a blackboard in the middle of it to explain what is going on.

The good thing is that Back to the Future, Part II mostly gets the time travel right in a way that the original did not. The movie jumps between the past events of the first movie (from a different point of view), the (now near) future, and an alternate universe 1985. Like any good time travel movie, it is a little confusing, but the plot is solid enough to withstand analysis, which makes Back to the Future, Part II the ultimate movie in the time travel genre.

Patrick Garone
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