Director: Robert Zemeckis
Cast: Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, Alfonso Arau
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure, but it’s probably been twenty years or more. Before motion capture carried the day, I was a Zemeckis completist.
Did I Like It: There’s a unique pleasure in not keeping a movie generally beloved—and, indeed, I remember liking—in regular rotation. I would give almost anything to see something like Back to the Future (1985)* with new eyes. Thankfully, I took to this film with only the dimmest of memories, and it was essentially like I was taking it in for the first time.
The story unfurls with such a breathless confidence that I’m surprised it isn’t taught as an example in screenwriting books, and it’s a real bummer that more work from Diane Thomas—including a supposedly lost draft of a haunted house-centric third Indiana Jones film—didn’t see the light of day before her untimely death.
The screenplay could blow away in the wind if the chemistry between Douglas and Turner wasn’t enough to sell entire movies on their own. There are few pairings on screen who are more fun to kind of/sort of hate each other. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at The War of the Roses (1989).
The film is probably a little less ageless than Zemeckis’ other epics of the 80s, and I can’t understand why/how Alan Silvestri was talked into a sax and synth-heavy score. Honest to God, the whole film sounds like the opening titles for an episode of Siskel & Ebert. I’m not even opposed to that in these circumstances, I just know that a different approach might have moved the film from merely charming to truly timeless. I know all the principals involved can ultimately do better.
That is a minor complaint, when so much of the film works so thoroughly, but it might just keep me from re-watching it too soon. Maybe in twenty years or so I can take it the movie in again as if it was almost new.
*Which would not exist without this film, as Zemeckis’ main claim to fame prior to ‘84 was being at least partly responsible for the only flops with which Steven Spielberg was associated.