Back to the Future Part III

Marty McFly is stranded in 1955 after Doc Brown and the DeLorean are struck by lightning at the end of Back to the Future Part II. A letter delivered decades later reveals that Doc survived and is living in 1885, where he has settled into life as a blacksmith.

Doc’s instructions are simple: Marty should recover the DeLorean hidden in an abandoned mine, return to 1985 and leave him in the past.

Then Marty and the 1955 version of Doc discover something that changes the plan. A gravestone reveals that Emmett Brown is destined to die only days after writing the letter.

Marty heads to 1885 to save his friend.

His arrival creates another problem almost immediately. The DeLorean’s fuel line is damaged, leaving Marty and Doc without the petrol needed to reach 88 miles per hour. With time running out, the pair must find another way of getting the car up to speed before history catches up with them.

The first two films revolve largely around Marty, but Part III gives Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown much more room.

After years spent building machines that bend time, Doc unexpectedly finds something in 1885 that makes him question whether he wants to leave at all. He meets schoolteacher Clara Clayton, and the eccentric scientist who has spent much of the trilogy warning Marty about disrupting history promptly becomes emotionally involved with someone from the past.

It gives Doc a wonderfully human dilemma. Returning Marty home is still important, but suddenly something in 1885 is worth staying for.

Christopher Lloyd gets to play more than the frantic inventor this time around. Doc remains gloriously excitable, but beneath the wild hair and scientific explanations, someone begins to wonder where he actually belongs.

Michael J. Fox gets his own western makeover when Marty arrives in 1885 and adopts the name Clint Eastwood.

It is exactly the sort of joke Back to the Future does brilliantly. Marty knows what the name will eventually mean; nobody around him has a clue.

But the Old West also forces Marty to confront one of his biggest weaknesses. Throughout the trilogy, he repeatedly loses control whenever somebody calls him a coward. His refusal to walk away from a challenge has already caused trouble in other timelines, and in 1885 that instinct puts him directly in Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen's path.

Thomas F. Wilson once again transforms the Tannen family menace for another generation. Mad Dog is less a school bully and more a genuinely dangerous outlaw, giving Marty a confrontation where getting angry at the wrong moment could have permanent consequences.

One of Part III’s smartest ideas is remarkably simple: take away the DeLorean’s fuel.

Doc and Marty have the time machine. They know when they need to leave. They even know exactly how fast it needs to travel.

They simply cannot make it reach 88 miles per hour.

That turns the final journey home into one of the trilogy’s great mechanical problems. Their solution involves a steam locomotive, a stretch of unfinished railway and another carefully calculated plan where everything has to happen at precisely the right moment.

Back to the Future has always made its climaxes feel like elaborate machines themselves. Several moving pieces have to line up perfectly while clocks, speedometers and approaching disaster remind us exactly how little time remains.

Part III takes that formula and puts it on rails.

Clara Clayton changes the direction of Doc’s life in a way no scientific experiment ever managed.

Played by Mary Steenburgen, Clara shares Doc’s fascination with science and the possibilities beyond the world immediately around them. Their relationship develops quickly, but that suits a movie where everyone is painfully aware that time is running out.

It also creates a lovely reversal.

For most of the trilogy, Doc tells Marty that history cannot simply be changed to suit what somebody wants. Now Doc is the one emotionally invested in changing events.

The scientist who built a time machine discovers that knowing the future does not necessarily make choosing one any easier.

By the third movie, the DeLorean is more than a prop. It has become a defining image of Back to the Future.

Part III has fun dropping that piece of 1980s technology into 1885. Against horses, steam engines and dusty frontier streets, the stainless-steel car looks even more impossibly futuristic.

But the film also understands that the trilogy has to end.

Marty finally makes it home, but the DeLorean’s journey reaches a much more definitive conclusion when an oncoming train destroys it on the tracks.

Doc had wanted the machine destroyed. After three movies of altered histories, paradoxes and near disasters, perhaps he had a point.

Of course, Doc Brown was never likely to give up inventing quite that easily.

Back to the Future Part III does something many franchise finales struggle to achieve: it actually feels like an ending.

Marty has changed. His future no longer has to follow the path he once saw. Doc has found a future of his own. The DeLorean is gone, and the endless temptation to keep rewriting yesterday disappears with it.

Then Doc returns aboard his extraordinary steam-powered time machine with Clara and their family.

Marty asks where he is going next.

Doc’s answer gets to the heart of the entire trilogy: the future has not been written yet.

After three movies obsessed with changing the past to protect tomorrow, Back to the Future ultimately leaves Marty — and us — looking forward instead.