Episode 127- Back to the Future Trilogy (w/ Evan Dickson)

[DaltonMaltz 1119]

Writer Evan Dickson joins Amy this week to discuss the complete Back to the Future trilogy! They pose the entire selection of films for entry into The Canon, touching on the deceptively deep themes, director Robert Zemeckis’s pioneering camerawork, and the unique middle-classiness of the BttF universe. Later, we find out why Biff Tannen is the most vile movie bully in cinematic history before Amy and Evan make their cases for which entries are Canon-worthy.

[A.V. 1]

amy!

 

still listening to the episode, but had to interrupt myself because you went to a boca game at the bonbonera and (naturally) had a blast! i mean, best stadium in the world IMO. but i'm an argentina-born boca fan living in oakland so i miss it so much.

 

here's the breakdown on calling someone a chicken in argentina. it is actually not that big a deal. typically. however what people were surely telling you is not to invoke that name while at the stadium because the archrivals of boca is river plate, and *their* nickname is the chickens. so basically, they were saying if you tell a boca fan that you think he or she is a river plate fan, that's fighting words. river plate fans have taken on the insult and made it their own, so if you call them a chicken they would ignore the meaning of coward and say, yeah, that's right, i am a chicken.

 

in return, boca fans are known as bosteros. this dates back to pre-car times when the neighborhood was populated by people whose jobs were to go up and down the city picking up horse dung (bosta) so people who picked up dung were called bosteros (i guess dung-ers?). and again, it's an insult if said in one way, but a word of pride if used internally.

 

and yeah, it's tragically true that a fan got killed recently for basically rooting for the other team. as you said, because of issues with violence only the home team fans are allowed in. but visiting fans want to see the game too, so they dress in the other team's jersey and go into the lions' den that way. this guy got found out (i believe he was wearing his own team's colors under the sanctioned ones) and he was receiving a beating on the stands, so he tried to jump from the 2nd tier to get away, and fell to his death. it was horrible.

 

you, or any other regular visitor, would not be in danger. you'd have to go into the area reserved for "la barra brava" (the hooligan gangs) and make yourself stand out somehow. so i would encourage any tourist to go ahead and go see a game in the regular stands. the atmosphere is amazing. and you'll be fine.

 

anyway, thought i'd elucidate. and now, back to... back to the future.

[50 Shades of Chauncey Gardiner 11]

As time has passed, Back to the Future holds the distinction of being the only major franchise to definitively end (save for Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy)... and stuck to it. There is something to be said about that.

 

Even by the mid-80's, it was becoming the norm to claim how a big hit movie was meant to be a trilogy. Credit to Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale for being straight-forward and not propping themselves up as "in the know" geniuses. I love and respect George Lucas but let's face it. His claims of Star Wars always being a giant nine-film series are provably BS, just by looking up old quotes he gave over the decades.

 

At the risk of reading too much into the Biff material, his fate in the corrected 1985 is fitting. Getting knocked out by George McFly in 1955 left Biff emotionally-neutered and incontinent. He lives in terror of George "finishing the job" one day and has had nightmares reliving that moment ever since. Always waking up screaming in his own excrement every night for 30 years. He even looks like he's wearing a diaper in the new timeline. He's a shell of his form self. George turned him into a harmless, sexless man-servant to the McFly clan.

 

To the topic at hand, Part II and III are rock solid, bringing everything together nicely and most importantly don't tarnish the original's reputation (Hello, Ghostbusters, Robocop and The Matrix). But Back to the Future is the one we all go back to for a reason - perfect example of "Right place, right time, right people." I prefer to give the original the slot in the Canon (We all know it will, no matter what) and leave those other two spots for other films... while acknowledging the trilogy as a whole works from start to finish.

[Robert Boberts 6]

My favorite 2015 prediction in Part 2 never occurred to me until I went back and watched it on BTTF day. They completely predicted urban gentrification, downtown revivals and the downfall of the suburbs.

[Jack Frost 252]

The first one is definitely Canon worthy. When my wife and I throw one on a lot of times we put in part 2 just because it has more thrills and spills, but it's a more frivolous movie. I understand wanting to take the trilogy as a whole but when the first one was such a complete film and the other two were retrofitted onto it, I don't feel like it necessary. It's Part One only, for me.

[sycasey 2.0 2301]

Evan makes the argument that you can't just watch one of the movies and feel like you got everything, but I disagree. It's very easy to watch just the first Back to the Future and feel completely satisfied, and I say that even with the "To Be Continued" tag added to the end. Even with that you just feel like it's a reference to old Flash Gordon type serials suggesting future adventures, which perfectly fits with the Lucas/Spielberg blockbuster school of filmmaking of the time. You don't necessarily NEED to see the next entry, though, because every major story point is wrapped up within the original running time.

 

As Evan noted in the podcast episode, Back to the Future works like a Swiss watch. It's a perfect piece of storytelling: lean and propulsive, but also character-based and thematically coherent, lending it additional depth. All of the lead performances are note-perfect: Fox, Lloyd, Glover, Thompson, and Wilson never step wrong. Zemeckis might have never done a better job of perfectly marrying his technical wizardry to the story at hand. It's also one of the most rewatchable movies I own, because of how well-structured and executed it is. I start tearing up when George lays out Biff, then extends his hand to Lorraine, every time. The climactic action scene still gets your heart racing, even though you know what will happen. Easy yes for the first movie.

 

Part 2 has a lot of interesting stuff in it, but Amy is right that almost everything memorable is in the first half, and probably mostly in the first third. Revisiting the school dance from Part 1 is an interesting technical exercise, but the emotional heft is not there; it's just Marty running around trying to get stuff. This gets at where Part 2 fails: you just don't care about the characters. It's probably true that this middle episode is largely the inspiration for Rick & Morty, but that's the problem: Doc behaves almost exactly like Rick Sanchez, only unlike in the cartoon that's not done to make a satirical point. Upon this most recent viewing, I was struck by what an asshole he is, just yanking Marty and Jennifer here and there with no regard for his prior principles re: time travel and the ethical implications. The cliffhanger ending falls flat because this movie fails to make you care about Doc's fate. There are a lot of cool ideas and design elements here, but it doesn't work as a story.

 

Thankfully, Part 3 rights the ship by returning Doc to a principled man who agonizes when faced with a situation that makes him want to abandon his principles. It's nowhere near as packed with details as Part 2, but it also takes the time to set up the characters and deepen the relationship between the leads. It's got more heart, and it works better as a stand-alone story. Marty's character trait of not wanting to back down from a challenge is introduced much more organically here than in Part 2 (Buford Tannen coming up with more creative ways to call him a chicken), and I think it's paid off well despite how clumsily the previous movie started this little sub-thread. Yes, it's mostly an excuse for Zemeckis to get to make the Western he wanted to make, but there's enough emotional and thematic content here for Part 3 to justify its own existence.

 

So how does this shake out? Part 2 is more interesting to think about and discuss after the fact, but not all that much fun to watch. Part 3 is a more functional story and easier to watch, but not as interesting to talk about. Neither is a Canon movie. Part 1 only!

[50 Shades of Chauncey Gardiner 11]

Amy and Evan are correct. Word-of-mouth on Back to the Future Part II was mixed and audiences felt ripped off at its cliffhanger ending. Thus while still a commercial hit, Part III suffered a severe fall compared to the original's gigantic $210 million and Part II's $118 million to a solid/respectable but disappointing $88 million.

 

I don't think the acceptance of Part II for its uniqueness of traveling into Back to the Future and seeing key moments from another angle came until the 2002 DVD release. Zemeckis called it "the most interesting film I've ever made" and that caught on. As a kid who was first experienced the trilogy with II, III and then BTTF, the 2015 segment of Part II was the best to watch... and even with Zemeckis' remarks (while true), that remains the case.

[bleary 333]

My only complaint with this episode was that it wasn't 3 hours long, because there's still so much to talk about with these 3 movies.

 

First off, I do wonder if there's anyone out who would have voted for "2 only" if that had been an option. I know that as a kid, my brother always claimed that Part 2 was his favorite, and I have to think there are some people somewhere who still feel that way.

 

Then onto my thoughts about the movies themselves. I think Amy and Evan did a great job talking about all the ways that Part 1 is perfect, and I'll echo that the most important thing that distinguishes Part 1 from the sequels is that Part 1 is really just about Marty understanding that his parents were his age once. And even though that's a simple enough idea, so much great stuff is mined from that, from him recognizing that his mom was looking to get laid, to the realization that his dad was the kind of kid who climbed a tree with binoculars and looks into girls' windows: the kinds of stories that no parent would want to tell their child, and that no child would really want to know about their parent either. This arc is what makes the movie good, and to be honest, Crispin Glover is what makes this arc work as perfectly as it does.

 

I'll pause here to direct everyone to fellow Earwolf podcast I Was There Too, in which episode #55 had Tom Wilson talk about his role as Biff.

 

Tom Wilson, in that podcast and in other interviews, has also pointed to Crispin Glover's performance as the real reason his own performance worked as well as it did. I think it was Amy in this episode who mentioned the intense reaction you feel when watching Biff be a bully, and it works because Glover was able to so perfectly play the habitually bullied kid. Moreover, he does this in such a way that not only was his reaction to being bullied believably, but you could immediately understand the history between these two: the defeated, beaten-down victim and his daily assailant. In many ways, this is the most important relationship in the film, because this is the only relationship that Marty actually completely changes in 1955, and we see the drastic effect it has on everyone's lives in 1985. Furthermore, the triumphant moment in the film doesn't belong to Marty, it belongs to George. All this is to say that Crispin Glover's work as George is what transforms this movie from something good and inventive to something truly special.

 

And it's easy to laud Glover all the more when he's missing in the sequels, which, in my opinion, don't work in his absence. In Part 2, the strong emotional core of familial generations understanding each other is replaced by, essentially, shenanigans. I don't want to dismiss this too much, because Part 2 might be the coolest of the movies. The idea of going back to the scenes from the previous movie and reviewing them from other vantage points is an objectively cool/fun/meta-in-all-the-good-ways idea. The concept of Doc having a letter delivered to Marty at the precise moment in 1955 when he disappeared is cool. The 2015 presented in Part 2 is cool. Hoverboards are cool, even if they don't work on water. And in hindsight, the accuracy of so many things in the 2015 scenes are cool. (A counterpoint to this though: if we're going to give points to BTTF Part 2 for correctly predicting the future, does that mean Blade Runner should lose points for so poorly predicting the future?)

 

But beyond the coolness, what is there in Part 2? For any sequel, there's a question of how beholden it is to the original, with some sequels only loosely tying to the original, or other sequels continuing one character's arc in a different type of story from the original. I say this because there are many successful ways to make a sequel. (See, for example, Thor 3, which ends up being an incredibly enjoyable movie in the ways that its predecessors are decidedly not.) However, I think a cardinal sin in making a sequel is changing your characters' impulses and motivations in a way that is unrealistic with respect to the amount of time that passed in the fictional universe between films. And in BTTF Part 2, there is zero time passed in the fictional universe between films, and yet Marty now has a completely new motivation that had never been mentioned before but now becomes the impetus of his character moving forward: no one calls him chicken? What? Then when Jennifer becomes a non-character, the only chance of a real emotional conflict is between Marty and his mother in alternate-1985, which has potential but is given too little screen time to really develop. Stripped of any real emotional arcs, Part 2 is little more than an exercise in complex plotting. And credit where credit is due, the plotting in Part 2 in mostly magnificent. (I must say though -- if I were Marty, I don't think I'd have taken Doc's handwaving explanation of why it was okay to leave Jennifer dumped in hellish-1985 as readily as he did in this film.) However, the chicken-shift in Marty's character and the lack of characters arcs in general always left me feeling pretty empty about Part 2.

 

And here's my potentially hot take: purely from a Campbellian storytelling point of view, Part 3 is better than Part 2. It absolutely lacks much of the time travel coolness present in Part 2, but it's clear what the journeys of the characters are, and I believe they're executed fairly well, relative to the chicken-shift in Part 2. (Although it's not as jarring as the chicken-shift, we get a slight character alteration in Part 3, with Doc's out-of-nowhere Jules Verne obsession. This is more believable that Doc could be super into Jules Verne, but it's a little weird that he's so into Jules Verne that he names his children Jules and Verne, yet had never mentioned anything about Jules Verne in either of the previous films?) Marty's motivation is to save Doc from 1985 and bring him back to the future, and his arc is to overcome his stupid, crippling chicken-pride. Doc's motivation is to get Marty back to the future and destroy the time machine forever, and his arc is discovering, with the help of Clara, that despite all his wonder with technological achievements, he's happier in 1885 than he ever could be in the 20th and 21st centuries. And this wasn't really mentioned in the podcast episode, but you really have to give it to Mary Steenburgen for making that aspect of the film work as well as it did. She made it completely believable why she'd be interested in Doc, and why Doc would be so conflicted about the possibility of losing her. I also like the emotional beats in this film between Doc and Marty, like the photo in front of the new clock. So I think there's actually a lot to like about this movie.

 

The problems with Part 3 are, of course, numerous as well, primarily that Marty doesn't really have anything to do between when he arrives back in 1885 and when he invents the bulletproof vest at the end. One could say that he plays Doc's part in Part 1, advising against forming relationships that could alter the future, but without the knowledge or gravitas that Doc had when he was the one advising. And honestly, the biggest issue I have with Part 3 is the ending, where Doc makes a new time machine in order to... pick up his dog? Say goodbye to Marty? Doc had been saying for the last movie and a half that the time machine was too dangerous and must be destroyed, yet he decided to build a new one anyway for pretty thin reasons. I'd have loved all the information that Doc gives Marty at the end to be delivered in another letter from 1885. It would have been better if Doc knew that he could reinvent the time machine in 1885, but chose not to. As it is, it's a bad ending to a pretty mediocre movie. But at least Marty overcame that chicken-pride.

 

So I really think that Part 1 is the only Canon-worthy entry. That said, I'm not angry if one or both of the other two get in, as there are scenes in them that I absolutely adore as well. As long as Part 1 gets in, I won't be upset with however this vote turns out.

[sycasey 2.0 2301]

Then onto my thoughts about the movies themselves. I think Amy and Evan did a great job talking about all the ways that Part 1 is perfect, and I'll echo that the most important thing that distinguishes Part 1 from the sequels is that Part 1 is really just about Marty understanding that his parents were his age once. And even though that's a simple enough idea, so much great stuff is mined from that, from him recognizing that his mom was looking to get laid, to the realization that his dad was the kind of kid who climbed a tree with binoculars and looks into girls' windows: the kinds of stories that no parent would want to tell their child, and that no child would really want to know about their parent either. This arc is what makes the movie good, and to be honest, Crispin Glover is what makes this arc work as perfectly as it does.

 

My experience with this movie over the years has let me to a working theory. It might just be my own projection, but I think it might be true for a lot of people:

 

When you're a kid you identify with Marty. When you're an adult you identify with George. The movie works either way, which is the genius of it.

[EvanDickson 30]

 

 

Then onto my thoughts about the movies themselves. I think Amy and Evan did a great job talking about all the ways that Part 1 is perfect, and I'll echo that the most important thing that distinguishes Part 1 from the sequels is that Part 1 is really just about Marty understanding that his parents were his age once. And even though that's a simple enough idea, so much great stuff is mined from that, from him recognizing that his mom was looking to get laid, to the realization that his dad was the kind of kid who climbed a tree with binoculars and looks into girls' windows: the kinds of stories that no parent would want to tell their child, and that no child would really want to know about their parent either. This arc is what makes the movie good, and to be honest, Crispin Glover is what makes this arc work as perfectly as it does.

 

 

 

 

Well put! I was trying to get at this when I was talking about how the father/son stuff was the real story of PT1, but I wish I'd looked at that point from this angle as well.

[AmandaNumbraOne 18]

I don’t have too much to add to this discussion, but it’s a great excuse to present y’all with my favorite goof that’s ever been left in a flick.

 

Just pay attention to the lil kid on the right:

 

 

Also, I love the way Crispin Glover laughs when he’s watching tv at the dinner table in the beginning of Back to the Future. He makes the movie for me.

[KickMuncher3 46]

I think it’s very telling that there are no selectable combinations without Part 1. Despite Evan’s claims that this is a complete trilogy, the sequels seem like superfluous tack-ons to a self-contained and, as many have said before, perfect movie. The original Back to the Future is so good I’d go so far as to call it the quintessential movie. Like, if I had to explain movies to someone using only one film, it’d be Back to the Future.

 

Sure, if you pick apart Part 1, you’ll be able to poke holes in it, but you overlook them because the movie is so perfect. On the other hand, the holes in the sequels are glaring even going so far as to break the central rule of the first movie, “if you change the past, you return to a different future,” when old Biff returns to the same 2016 he left. Not to mention the de-escalation of settings (crazy future to alternate present to the same 1955 as the last movie). It’s flaws like these and others mentioned (the “chicken” thing, the lack of the father/son relationship, etc.) that not only ruin #2 for me, but also sour the memory of the first film in a way that makes me wish the sequels had never been made.

 

Part 3 is more innocuous but less interesting than Part 2. I think they missed a real opportunity to make it a historically accurate period piece and have all of Marty’s Hollywood western knowledge be useless (instead of it being mostly accurate).

 

Overall, my vote is for Part 1 only. Part 2 and 3 are okay, but if Empire Strikes Back isn’t in the Canon, then the Back to the Future sequels sure as hell aren’t.

[pomattovich 75]

There's not much more that I can add that wasn't already covered on the episode. BACK TO THE FUTURE is perfect. A flawless mashup of genres that genuinely is better than I remember every time I watch it. It is an easy YES vote into The Canon. But what about the sequels? Frankly, I find each to be an enjoyable diversion, while neither being terribly great films. What I always found beautiful about the ending of the first film, was that it ends before we even get to Marty's future. As if the future doesn't matter. I like the idea of leaving it to the viewer's imagination, especially with the teasing joke that he now has to help his kids, after he spent the previous film helping his parents.

 

But while the 2015 sequence has a lot of clever gags and colorful visuals, I don't think it lives up the promise of one's own imagination. The sequels are also where the films start to get "cute." Actors reprising roles as ancestors and progeny. Repetitive jokes hammering home the cyclical nature of this world to the point that it no longer feels real. And what's really missed most is the thing that makes the first film so great... Crispin Glover. Because of the trilogy, we consider these films to be a buddy adventure story about Marty and Doc Brown, but Doc Brown is merely the catalyst in the first film. The real relationship at the focus is a father/son story. The sequels merely become paradoxical adventures, albeit occasionally fun ones. I was always annoyed by the last act of Part 2 back in 1955, where Marty has to carefully avoid undoing everything he did in the first movie. It's a clever idea that just isn't all that fun. I actually rather enjoy Part 3, partly because I'm a western fan and I also think that the element with Mary Steenburgen at least feels different from any of the previous subplots in the other two films.

 

I could go on for pages, dissecting every little thing about these films, but such a thing is unnecessary. The question is whether the entire trilogy should be entered into The Canon. I think not. The sequels aren't bad, but they are lesser, and I have no problem excluding them, unlike how I thought that the context of The Godfather Part III was important enough to consider it part of a whole saga, even if it wasn't as consistently strong as the other two films. I'm sure I'll watch all three of these films several more times throughout my life, but only the first one truly stands the test of time as a great comedy, sci-fi, nostalgic, family film. Welcome to The Canon, Part 1. And I'll see you on cable, Parts 2 and 3.

[LondonCallingRex 33]

I'm very torn on this. My brain tells me that only the first is worthy of Canonization, especially in this demented world where Empire Strikes Back was shut out TWICE. And that's a very logical argument, brain! But I love this trilogy so dearly despite its flaws. The Canon is not made up of perfect films, it's made up of films that have stood, or should stand, the test of time, or at the bare minimum they're movies that we should all see for some historical contextual reason. The first film is a perfect film that has stood the test of time, so it's a no brainer, and I'm honestly shocked there exists a person who is voting No on it. The other two, though, are imperfect movies that still stand the test of time, have influenced countless cultural touchstones, and mean so much to me personally. I watched them on taped-from-TV VHS with my family when I was a kid, and I can't envision a future where I don't share them with my currently nonexistent kids. So I'm torn. But I think at the end of the day I have to remember that I'm not voting for what I THINK will make it into The Canon (1 only, though the votes suggest 2 may make it as well), I'm voting for MY OWN Canon of great films. MY Canon includes Empire Strikes Back, The Fly, and unquestionably all three Back To The Future films.

[FictionIsntReal 79]

I think the first one solidly belongs in, but not the next two. People remember some gimmicks like the hoverboard, but that's not really enough. Empire Strikes Back didn't get in the Canon, and these sequels are FAR less deserving.

 

Biff Tannen was named after studio exec Ned Tanen, who greatly disliked Gale & Zemeckis' script for "I Wanna Hold Your Hand".

 

Inherited wealth does not seem to be that important in the US in the long-term. In early American history there were land lotteries, and the descendants of the winners don't seem to be that different from those who didn't.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/the-lottery/

 

Depending on how seriously you take self-reported happiness studies, in 2006 women reported being slightly less happy than men, whereas decades prior they had reported higher levels of happiness:

http://freakonomics.com/2009/10/14/nickeled-and-dimed-by-barbara-ehrenreich/

They also note that, more in accordance with our expectations, blacks report higher levels of happiness in later decades.

[EvRobert 1684]

I voted for the OG, the first, BTTF. It's an undeniable classic that still holds up. I recently tried to watch TEEN WOLF and that movie just drags. You keep waiting for the wolf stuff to happen, but Back To The Future, people have watched it for 30+ years and will watch it for 30 more.

 

The other two, I love, but if I only have time for one, I watch the first one, but it is an interesting debate to have, is the series complete without parts 2 and 3? Do you canonize the trilogy or he one part of it?

 

In a weird way, it reminds me of the (non-existent) WWE Hall of Fame. Is Ric Flair the greatest professional wrestler of all time? Probably and does deserve to be there, does he deserve to be in as a singles wrestler AND as a member of a stable? Arguable, even if that stable (the Four Horsemen) is probably the greatest most influential stable of all time.

 

Back To The Future certainly deserves to be in the Canon. Do parts two and three? MAYBE. BTTF does deserve props for being a trilogy, that stayed a trilogy, worked on by the same creative staff. Very few series can claim that (Nolan's Batman, Rami's Evil Dead? But even that has a remake, even if it was grandfathered by Rami, so maybe ED doesn't count). And parts 2 & 3 are GOOD films, but do they deserve to be in the canon for being good enough to not sully a great part one?

[EvanDickson 30]

One counter someone mentioned was, "what about LOTR? They were all directed by Peter Jackson and they have his creative DNA all over them." While I think this is a valid point, they were also based on a huge best-selling trilogy. I'm trying to think of the last top-to-bottom big budget trilogy that retained the same writer/director throughout its entire course. In the episode I post that it's the BTTF trilogy, but I'm open to counterarguments on this.

[sycasey 2.0 2301]

One counter someone mentioned was, "what about LOTR? They were all directed by Peter Jackson and they have his creative DNA all over them." While I think this is a valid point, they were also based on a huge best-selling trilogy. I'm trying to think of the last top-to-bottom big budget trilogy that retained the same writer/director throughout its entire course. In the episode I post that it's the BTTF trilogy, but I'm open to counterarguments on this.

 

The original LOTR is probably the greater trilogy.

 

But of course they also couldn't leave well enough alone with that one and later made it into a six-movie series.

[EvanDickson 30]

 

The original LOTR is probably the greater trilogy.

 

But of course they also couldn't leave well enough alone with that one and later made it into a six-movie series.

 

I actually think BTTF 1 is better than any single film in LOTR. Though LOTR may be the better trilogy.

 

But the overall question I meant to ask with that was -- "what is the last great original trilogy (not based on anything other than the filmmakers' initial script) that retained the same directing and writing team throughout?"

[scurvy 3]

I think a missed facet of these films is the fact that 3 genres are covered and relatively well.

There's a good 50s high school film, a good futuristic sci fi and a decent (read very watchable) western.

The reuse of actors and characters throughout ia done very well. Especially when compared to say the glorious car crash known as Cloud Atlas.

Thats why i think all 3 deserve to be in. Genre, heart, hunour and performances are excellent throughout and its no mean feat to make 3 family friendly movies that are enjoyable for all members of the family. I cant think of another sequel that's achieved that.

[EvRobert 1684]

One counter someone mentioned was, "what about LOTR? They were all directed by Peter Jackson and they have his creative DNA all over them." While I think this is a valid point, they were also based on a huge best-selling trilogy. I'm trying to think of the last top-to-bottom big budget trilogy that retained the same writer/director throughout its entire course. In the episode I post that it's the BTTF trilogy, but I'm open to counterarguments on this.

 

the last big budget, top to bottom trilogy with the same creative team that I can think of is The Matrix films. Now BTTF is superior in every way to the Matrix films, but they did retain the same writers/directors for three films and was wholly their vision, like it or not.

 

there's also the three Austin Powers movies, all directed by Jay Roach, all written and produced and starring Mike Myers. Again nowhere near as good as BTTF.

[EvanDickson 30]

Ahhh THE MATRIX. You are right. But yes, imo Reloaded and Revolution are not really much fun at all.

[NRoberson86 78]

These were the first films I was obsessed with. Yet now, I can only justify enshrining the first part. The other two are very fun, and I love them for many reasons, but neither part II nor III can stand on its own. The first one is a perfect movie, while the other entries have many flaws discussed on the show.

 

Off-topic note: Sorry to be the political crank, but early on in the episode there was some of the rehabilitation of Bush 43 going on. I know this isn't a politics podcast, and I really don't expect the best politics to come out of LA--sorry, the track record just isn't there--but this grinds my gears. Bush 43 put us into an unnecessary war based on a lie that resulted in the rise of ISIS and the outbreak of civil war in Syria. He normalized a surveillance state. Trump is a product of Bush 43. If you're not a fan of the blustering idiot, don't long for the previous jackass that made his ascension possible.

[LondonCallingRex 33]

As for great trilogies with a single distinct vision, does the Before trilogy count? Not sure you can do much better than that, especially given the span of time between those films. I really really hope those come up for The Canon at some point because they're all deserving.

[EvanDickson 30]

Off-topic note: Sorry to be the political crank, but early on in the episode there was some of the rehabilitation of Bush 43 going on. I know this isn't a politics podcast, and I really don't expect the best politics to come out of LA--sorry, the track record just isn't there--but this grinds my gears. Bush 43 put us into an unnecessary war based on a lie that resulted in the rise of ISIS and the outbreak of civil war in Syria. He normalized a surveillance state. Trump is a product of Bush 43. If you're not a fan of the blustering idiot, don't long for the previous jackass that made his ascension possible.

 

I hear you. And I agree. I was speaking only to the relief I would feel w/r/t Donald Trump not having his finger on the button. If given a wide-ranging list of choices for a replacement, 43 would still likely be near the very bottom.