Time travel remains one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. While many people wonder if it is possible to go back in time, in 1985s Back to the Future, Martin McFly, better known as Marty (Michael J Fox), and Doctor Emmet Brown, simply known as “Doc” (Christopher Lloyd), had already figured out how to visit different timelines.
Back to the Future (1985)
In Back to the Future, Marty is sent back to 1955 and meets up with the past Doc. Then they have to work together to bring Marty back to the time he actually belongs. But things turn out to be more difficult than they had expected.
When Marty arrives in 1955, he accidentally interferes with the moment his parents meet. So now, not only do they have to try to send him back, but they also have to make his parents fall in love, to keep the family line the way it is supposed to be.
The movie was a complete hit, becoming the highest-grossing film of the year, meaning it earned more worldwide ticket sales than any other film yet. Besides being a commercial success, it also became very popular with the public, turning out to be considered a classic of the eighties.
Back to the Future II (1989)
The first movie was such a huge success that only four years after it was released, the public got to watch Marty and Doc in another adventure. In Back to the Future II, on the same night Marty returned to his original timeline, Doc shows up saying they need to travel in time again. This time, to the future.
The year is 2015, and while trying to stop Marty’s kid from making a huge mistake, the movie presents a world never seen before: the future, or at least what people thought the future would look like.
Now, 40 years after the release of the first movie of the trilogy, we want to revisit the predictions they had about the future and how it actually played out.
What we are still waiting for
The very first thing we can notice in the future of the movie is flying cars. I guess Marty and Doc would be disappointed to know that even ten years after the year the movie was played out, we still have to drive our cars only on the streets, as well as skateboards that, unlike what was shown in the movie, also can’t fly.
The futuristic style was also a change that didn’t really happen in 2015 or in 2025. Aside from that, in the very first moments of Marty in the future, we can see he wears sneakers that tie themselves. The thing is, the wardrobe piece actually exists and was made by Nike, just as it appears in the movie. But the actual sneakers are very rare and expensive. So I’m sorry, Marty, in the future you still have to tie your own shoes.
As well as the shoes, an interesting piece of clothing shown in the movie is jackets that dry themselves. Imagine going out in the rain and being able to be dry before getting to places. Well, it’s another thing that will stay in our imagination because the thing is, we still have to wait for clothes to dry or use a dryer to make it faster.
Predictions that came true
But the movie wasn’t all wrong with the predictions; some things actually turned out to be true in the future. For example, we can see that in the future, in order for people to enter their houses, they have to put their fingerprints, so then a machine identifies who they are and opens the door. The movie was right on that, and fingerprint identification has been around for a while now.
In the movie, we can see that the characters from the past were pretty surprised by this new technology, but have you thought about what Marty and Doc would think about facial ID?
Another technology shown in the movie that actually existed was video calls. We can see that future Marty receives the news that he has been fired through a video call, that could be considered pretty realistic, thinking that most work meetings can be done through a screen nowadays.
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The article above was edited by Isabelle Bignardi.
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