After visiting 2015, Marty McFly must repeat his visit to 1955 to prevent disastrous changes to 1985, without interfering with his first trip. (from IMDb)

I have such a love/hate relationship with the Back to the Future sequels. Where the 1985 original film was near perfection, its first sequel, from 1989, is quite the hot mess. Many fans of the trilogy herald the second film as the best, but especially stacked up against the original, there's really just no comparison.

Even from the opening scene where they refilmed the ending of the first film, replacing Claudia Wells' Jennifer Parker with Elisabeth Shue (Oh, how you are missed, Claudia!), and the "17-year-old" Marty McFly is visibly a lot older (he was 28 at the time)... and questionably shaggier... things feel off. The performances are slightly more heightened, if not entirely more caricature in nature, than the first movie. Heck - if you didn't know Robert Zemeckis had returned, you might swear someone else was in the director's chair this time around.

Then there's the "future." Zemeckis has since said he never wanted to do a future movie, but felt backed into a corner with ending the first movie sending Marty, Doc - and Jennifer - hurtling toward 2015. Now, whether his disdain for futuristic envisioning is what we actually see on screen, I don't know, but the charm and sincerity of Back to the Future is glaringly absent from its first sequel. Furthermore, once the trio make it back to 1985, it's now this darker, twisted, nightmarish take on the year that causes Doc and Marty to have to figure out how to fix things they messed up by toying with future events in 2015. This does create a scenario that allows the plot to revisit the events of the first film in 1955 (an idea that Avengers Endgame wonderfully mimicked in 2019), but it isn't quite enough to right the ship entirely. Sure, Back to the Future, Part II gave us that now-iconic pink Mattel hoverboard... but at what cost? (Ha!)

Sadly, Back to the Future II is one of those movies that is frustrating for me to watch. I want to see these characters that I love so much again, but they don't completely feel like the characters I fell in love with just four years earlier. Part of it is definitely the "off" performances and tone this time around -- although both Fox and Lloyd do seem to nail their characters enough of the time to make the sequels bearable (Seriously, though, Christopher Lloyd feels like he's trying to play himself playing Doc Brown. His performance in the 1985 film felt so natural and nuanced. It's a bit more cartoony this go-around). But it's line deliveries like "I don't know how to tell you this, Jennifer, but - you're in a time machine!" or his whiney line in the Alternate 1985 timeline, "I don't understand one d*mn thing that's going on around here, and why nobody can give me a simple straight answer!," that make Fox's performance feel cringy at times. Then there's the darkness in scenes, like the Alternate 1985. You had happy-go-lucky Biff at the end of the first movie, and now he's sinister again, setting up Part II, but when we get to Alternate 1985, it's the seediest, grimiest, nastiest version of Hill Valley that can be squeezed into a PG rating (this movie is easily PG-13 by today's standards). There's also that heightened goofiness for much of the movie. Lea Thompson's entire performance of Lorraine is heightened and more cartoony -- from elderly 2015 Lorraine to drunk and bosom-enhanced Alternate 1985 Lorraine, to even the brief scene with 1955 Lorraine... nothing feels quite right. It feels more like she's acting in a school play based on Back to the Future than the movie itself. Still, by the last act, when we're getting back to 1955 and seeing scenes from the original movie from a new perspective, it kind of starts to feel a little bit more like home.

As you watch Back to the Future II, knowing the third film ahead of time, it's fun to pick up on some little Easter Eggs that'll lead into the third one. There's Biff watching the Clint Eastwood western where Clint makes a makeshift bulletproof vest, Doc's shirt covered with a train design on it, and even the historical video outside Biff's casino that mentions the western outlaw Bufford "Mad Dog" Tannen. It's the benefit of the sequels being made at the same time. Zemeckis saying he never wanted to make a future movie is felt in this one, but he's also said he was more interested in making a western, and that love is most definitely felt in Back to the Future, Part III... but more on that another time.

The content for Back to the Future II is much edgier than either the original or the third one. It's almost like, either Zemeckis forgot these were family movies, or he just didn't care. Profanity is increased across the board, and there's a bit more sexual content -- with even Biff having a French adult magazine in his possession that we briefly see pages of in two scenes. I get that Zemeckis probably wanted the horrible Alternate 1985 to seem truly nightmarish, but he could have toned down some of the adult content and still kept it horrifying. But as it is, there are 7 uses of the "S" word, 5 "S.O.B," 24 "h*ll," 16 "d*mn," and a bunch of others. The only upside here is the blasphemy was cut back to one use of Jesus' name this time. There's violence - like Biff trying to literally kill Marty in a couple scenes, and we also find out that Biff had killed George McFly years before Marty finds himself in the messed up Alternate 1985. Overall, it's a much different kind of Back to the Future story, and easily my least favorite of the three.

A sequel to Back to the Future was certainly welcomed, but this movie is not the one most fans probably hoped for. As I said earlier, it's become a cult classic, with many BTTF fans calling it their favorite of the trilogy, but very little about what made the first one so great seems to be present in this one. At the very least, I guess, it paved the way for the western that is Back to the Future, Part III, but other than that, it feels like a poor attempt to cash in on what we all loved about Back to the Future in the first place.

Regarding its 4K transfer - I wasn't too impressed with the 4K digital copy, but the 4K disc looks sharper and more vibrant. I'd say that this isn't the most dazzling 4K transfer you can find, but it's a nice little update for this 36-year-old film.