Back to the Future Part III

So I guess it took me long enough to finish the trilogy. The original is a classic action comedy, and the second part feels like a dopey retread without an ending but still has enough fun moments to prevent it from being too bad. Part three is of similar quality, though it does have the nice bonus of wrapping up all the loose ends in the story that spans 130 years (We're only five years away from Marty's life in the future. I can't wait for flying cars that run on garbage!). The problem with this movie is sort of the setting, taking place mostly in the late 1800s. They do some interesting stuff with the western setting, but in general it just sort of justifies taking an entire two hours to return to the future and a lot of its best moments aren't its own. Like, it makes sense that they'd pay homage to Marty's new alias Clint Eastwood by redoing the ending of A Fistful of Dollars, but how many people are actually going to recognize that? I don't know.

In a lot of ways, it just sort of doesn't work as a time travel movie the way the first two do. In the first film, Marty and Doc Brown are constantly dealing with the ramifications of messing up the course of events, and in part two, they run all over the space-time continuum trying to undo their mistakes, but that's less of a concern here than just trying to survive long enough to get the time machine working. It's a decent steampunk western posing as science fiction. And I'm not sure it actually matters to me that the Doc got himself a lady. I don't begrudge him the happiness, but the movie would have been a whole lot simpler if he just listened to his own lectures on screwing with history. The epilogue where everything gets set right in the present and future is half satisfying and half too convenient, but the series spent its entire existence playing fast and loose with the laws of physics so it didn't bother me too much. I hate to say my enjoyment was affected by an unrelated film, but Primer just raised the time travel bar so much that a movie has to be somewhat outstandingly entertaining to get away with what Back to the Future does, and this one just wasn't really that good.