--- title: 'Nobody Warns You That It Is About Your Parents' type: 'film-review' film: 'Back to the Future (1985)' director: 'Robert Zemeckis' author: 'Marcus Reid' rating: '9.0/10' stars: '4.50/5' published: '2026-08-19' updated: '2026-08-19' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/reviews/nobody-warns-you-that-it-is-about-your-parents' film_url: 'https://cinepixo.com/movies/back-to-the-future-1985' publisher: 'CinePixo' genres: - 'Comedy' - 'Adventure' - 'Science Fiction' spoilers: 'none' --- # Nobody Warns You That It Is About Your Parents **Marcus Reid** on *Back to the Future* (1985) — **9.0/10** (4.50 of 5 stars) > The DeLorean gets the poster, but the reason the last act plays like a held breath is that a boy has met his mother and father as teenagers and cannot help liking them. *Zemeckis and Gale built a clockwork so smooth that people praise the clock instead of the picture, and the picture is a genuinely moving story about forgiving two people for having once been young and frightened.* --- ## It is a family drama wearing a very good disguise I have watched this movie more times than is respectable, and every time I am struck by the same thing: nobody warns you that it is about your parents. You come for the car. You stay because a seventeen-year-old boy has to sit in a diner and look at his father as a seventeen-year-old boy, and find out that the man was a coward before he was a disappointment. That is a real subject. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale built a machine around it so smooth that people talk about the machine instead. Fine — the machine is a marvel. But the reason the last act plays like a held breath is not the plutonium. It is that Marty McFly has met his mother and father as kids and he likes them, which is the last thing he expected and the one thing that could hurt him. ## The house tells you everything before anyone speaks Look at the McFly house in 1985. It is not squalid — it is worse than squalid, it is beaten. The furniture is perfectly adequate. The television is on and nobody is really watching it. Lorraine has a drink and a story she has told before, and Lea Thompson plays her with a kind of glazed sweetness that is the most quietly devastating thing in the movie. Crispin Glover's George laughs at the television at exactly the wrong pitch. In four minutes, without a single line of exposition about the family's history, you know precisely how much life has been surrendered in that room and roughly when. Then the film takes the same actors, hands them thirty fewer years, and lets you watch them be capable of something. Glover's 1955 George is not a different person; he is the same nervous man before the nervousness set like concrete. Thompson's Lorraine is not a different woman; she is that sweetness with the glaze not yet on. Both performances depend on you having seen the later version first, which is a screenwriting trick of a very high order, and both actors are good enough to make the trick feel like observation. I keep coming back to Glover's hands. He does something with them — a fold, a retreat — that he does in both time periods, and it is the same gesture at two different pressures. That is an actor thinking. ## Michael J. Fox is doing more work than he gets credit for Fox has to be the audience's representative and the film's engine at once. He is on screen almost continuously and he is almost always reacting to something absurd, which is the fastest way for a performance to go shrill. He never does. He plays each impossibility as a practical problem: right, that happened, now what. When his eyes change — and they change several times, always a beat before the dialogue admits it — you see a kid recalculating what he thought he knew about the two people who raised him. Christopher Lloyd is the opposite strategy and it works because Fox is holding the floor. Doc Brown is played at maximum volume with total sincerity, no wink anywhere, and that sincerity is what keeps a cartoon from becoming a smirk. The friendship between them is written thinly and performed thickly. You believe it because both men behave as though they have already had a hundred conversations you were not present for. Thomas F. Wilson deserves a word too. Biff is a genuinely frightening piece of work in the 1955 scenes — not a comic bully, a real one, with the particular menace of somebody who has never once been told no. ## Every joke pays a debt The screenplay's reputation as a clockwork is deserved and slightly misdescribed. It is not that everything is a setup for a later payoff, though a great deal is. It is that the setups are all *characterisation* first. A detail that will matter later is introduced as something a person wants, or fears, or cannot stop saying. So the mechanism never feels like a mechanism while it is loading. You are watching people; then later you find out you were also watching a plan. Alan Silvestri's score gets this. It is enormous — brass piled on brass — and it treats a boy driving a car as an event of historical significance, which from inside the boy's life it is. Zemeckis stages the big sequences with real geography: you always know where the car is, where the clock is, how much road is left. Modern films of this size routinely lose that, and losing it costs them everything Zemeckis banks. ## What it promised, and kept I grade against the promise a picture makes in its first ten minutes. This one promises a fast, funny, ingeniously constructed entertainment about a kid and a car, and it delivers that completely while smuggling in a story about forgiving your parents for being people. Nothing in it is cruel. Nobody in it is despised, not even Biff, who is simply allowed to be what he is. There is a scene late on that I will not describe, in which George McFly finally does the thing the whole film has been waiting for him to do, and the audience I saw it with in a full house made a noise I have heard maybe a dozen times in a cinema. Not a laugh. A cheer that starts before the action finishes, because everyone has understood what it will cost him. Forty-one years on it still gets that noise. That is not nostalgia. That is construction. --- ## The film Released 1985 · Directed by Robert Zemeckis · 115 min · Rated PG · Comedy, Adventure, Science Fiction · United States IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/ Published by CinePixo — https://cinepixo.com/reviews/nobody-warns-you-that-it-is-about-your-parents Review © Marcus Reid. Film metadata supplied by TMDB.