Had never seen this third installment. As a film itself I found it more fun than the second, which had enough 80s-era race politics baked into its dystopian vision of a “bad” future that I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. At this point the series is self-referential, an ouroboros of nods and winks to the audience that rely on the previous installments for humor: here’s Marty with the wrong footwear, again. Here’s the clock tower, here’s horses instead of skateboards and hoverboards. Here’s Biff, always Biff, always destined for the manure pile. I laughed even if I already kinda knew where everything was headed.
The ending is a letdown, because even though Doc Brown and Marty say they’ve learned a valuable lesson about messing with time, the laws of blockbusters state that you cannot definitively close the door to more adventures. How long will it be until this series is excavated in the IP strip mine of nostalgia?