Plot
Seventeen-year-old Marty McFly lives with his bleak, unambitious family in Hill Valley, California. His father, George McFly, is bullied by his supervisor, Biff Tannen, while his unhappy mother, Lorraine Baines McFly, is an alcoholic. Marty's underachieving older siblings, Dave and Linda, also live in the household. When Marty and his band audition to perform at the high school dance, they are rejected. Despite this setback, Marty's girlfriend, Jennifer, encourages him to pursue the dream of being a rock musician. At dinner that night, Lorraine recounts how she and George first fell in love when her father hit George with his car.
Marty meets his friend, scientist Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown, late at night in the parking lot of a deserted shopping mall where Doc reveals a time machine made from a modified 1981 DeLorean DMC-12; the vehicle's time displacement is powered by plutonium, which supplies the 1.21 gigawatts of power to a device he calls the "flux capacitor." Doc explains that the car travels to a programmed date upon reaching 88 miles per hour, using the date November 5, 1955, as an example destination. Before Doc can make his first trip, the Libyan terrorists from whom he stole the plutonium shoot him. Marty attempts to escape in the DeLorean and inadvertently activates the time machine. He is transported back to November 5, 1955, and finds himself without the plutonium needed for the return trip.
While exploring Hill Valley, Marty meets his teenaged father, who is being bullied by Biff. As George is about to be hit by Lorraine's father's car, Marty pushes him out of the way and is knocked out by the impact. Consequently, a teenaged Lorraine becomes infatuated with Marty instead of George. Marty is disturbed by her flirtations and leaves to find the younger Doc of 1955. Marty convinces Doc that he is from the future, and asks for help returning to 1985. Doc explains that the only available power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of energy is a bolt of lightning. Discovering the "Save the Clock Tower" flyer that Marty received in 1985, indicating that lightning will strike the courthouse clock tower the following Saturday at 10:04 pm, Doc makes plans to harness the lightning strike to power the DeLorean's flux capacitor. When they observe a fading photograph of Marty with his siblings, they realize Marty has prevented his parents from meeting, jeopardizing his family's existence.
Marty attempts to set George up with Lorraine. To make his parents fall in love, Marty plans to have George "rescue" Lorraine from Marty's inappropriate advances on the night of the school dance. A drunk Biff unexpectedly shows up, pulls Marty from the car, and attempts to force himself on Lorraine. George arrives to rescue her from Marty, but instead finds Biff, who humiliates George and pushes Lorraine to the ground. Standing up to him for the first time, George knocks Biff out. A smitten Lorraine follows George to the dance floor, where they kiss for the first time, ensuring Marty's existence.
Marty arrives at the clock tower where Doc is making final preparations for the lightning strike, and tries to warn Doc of his impending 1985 murder in a letter, but Doc tears it up, fearing it will lead to altering the future. A falling tree branch disconnects Doc's wiring setup, but Doc repairs the connections in time to send Marty and the DeLorean back to 1985. Although Marty arrives too late to prevent him from being shot, Doc is still alive and admits to reading the letter anyway and wearing a bulletproof vest.
Doc drops Marty off at home and uses the time machine to travel 30 years into the future. Marty awakens the next morning to find his family changed; Lorraine is happy and physically fit, a self-confident George is a successful science fiction author, Dave is an office employee, and Linda no longer has trouble finding boyfriends. George and Lorraine now have a closer relationship than ever, while Biff has become an auto detailer/washer who is on good terms with the McFly family. As Marty reunites with Jennifer, Doc arrives, insisting they accompany him to the future to sort out a problem with their future children. Marty and Jennifer enter the upgraded DeLorean, now a hovercar powered by nuclear fusion, and Doc flies the time machine into the future.
Read more about this topic: Back To The Future
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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