MovieChat Forums > Back to the Future Part II (1989) Discussion > Why do people complain that Back to the ...

Why do people complain that Back to the Future II is too dark?

posted 6 years ago by TMC-4 (19442)
6 replies | jump to latest

Is it because of the alternate (It's a Wonderful Life inspired)-1985 version of Hill Valley under Biff's control, where George McFly is murdered?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqlmMw108rE

The first movie had its own dark moments too like Doc Brown being killed by the Libyans or the whole subplot of Marty having to preserve his and his siblings own existence while in 1955. I always found the scene in which Marty's hand starts to fade when he can't play the guitar at the dance to be extremely disturbing.

[–] [deleted] 6 years ago

Yes, you are right about that. All 3 movies in the trilogy have their dark moments.

I didn't know that people complained about it being too dark. I thought a lot of people liked that it was dark

Btw, Part 2 is my favorite in the whole trilogy!

[–] GreenGoblinsOck8 (7414) 6 years ago

I actually like Part 2 best. Though I still like the other 2.

[–] Martoto (4255) 5 years ago

Maybe it's got something to do with Marty returning to a "nightmarish" version of 1985 to discover, gasp, black people living in his house.

[–] GreenGoblinsOck8 (7414) 5 years ago

It isn't that they're black. It's that the father of the family tries to kill him by beating him to death with a baseball bat. To be fair he seemed to think Marty was from one of the gangs in town. In Marty's original timeline they were probably living a lot better.

[–] Martoto (4255) 5 years ago

Right.....

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

It was 'nightmarish' because a strange family was living in his house. It didn't matter that they were black. It mattered that it wasn't his own mom, dad and siblings.

The black element was probably to show how racist this society was. Alternate 1985 Biff was using his power to drive out black people from Hill Valley, and so the head of the black family mistakenly believed that Marty was one of Biff's thugs.

The Back to the Future franchise gets a lot of stick for 'racism', some of which is partly understandable (like Marty 'inventing Rock 'n' Roll - although strictly speaking that is not the case, and the scene where he performs 'Johnny B Goode' is actually a subversive joke at the way white people appropriated popular music from African-Americans, the way Elvis and others did), but the Alternate 1985 sequence is pretty progressive in depicting a 'Hell' Valley run by a Trump-like bully-boy misogynist who has allowed the town's white supremacists to run riot.