Back to the Future II – 1989
I’m not exactly sure what to say about this movie. Focusing on the special effects, I have to say, I was surprised by the low quality of some of them, while others were very good. They did something I have only seen in two other films, though I’m sure it has been done in many films I haven’t seen, which was to use time travel so that a person could interact with events we have already seen, thus showing us the same scene, but from a completely different perspective.
But let’s cover the disappointing effects first. The most obvious one was in a scene in which Old Biff steals the Delorean and crashes it into a garbage dumpster. Most of the flying car shots throughout the film looked great, but a few of them, like this one, just didn’t. The motion of the car was jerky and stiff, as if it was a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out that bumped into the trash. Granted, I haven’t seen many flying cars lately, but it didn’t seem to move realistically during the impact.
Next was the hoverboards. For the most part, the effects were passable, but there were several shots, like the one in which three punks in 2015 throw their boards down towards the camera. In that one shot, the boards themselves look like they don’t belong in the shot. The shadows they cast look like they are shaking in a strange animated way. Again, they looked like two-dimensional cut-outs.
But then there were some really good effects, having to do with split-screens and actors having to play opposite themselves. There was one scene in which Michael J. Fox plays himself, his son, and his daughter, all on the screen at the same time, all interacting with each other. That was pretty impressive. But what was even more impressive than that was when they had to recreate scenes from the first Back to the Future film, costumes, sets, props, actors and all. In the 1950s setting, the current Marty weaves his way in and out of the high-school dance sequence. They used actual shots from the previous film and new shots filmed for this one, but shown from different angles and perspectives, to create a new story line that took place behind the one we’d seen before. That whole sequence was done incredibly well.
During the hoverboard scenes, ILM used computer animation techniques to seamlessly remove all the wires that were holding up the floating stunt men. And there were plenty of other great effects like animated lightning, some pretty cool stunts, and a pretty cheesy hologram effect from the 2015 sequence, in which a hologram shark from a Jaws 19 advertisement harmlessly chomps down on Marty.
So I’d say the visual effects from this film were about fifty-fifty. Some were great, and some were questionable. But unfortunately, the one illusion in the film that really didn’t work for me was not even technically a visual effect, except that it kind of was. It was the makeup. Some of the makeup effects, making characters look old, looked way too much like makeup. But ok, the actors seemed to be playing caricatures of themselves, so it almost worked. Well, better luck next time.