'Back To The Future' Analysis: Opening 5 Minutes

(VIDEO ABOVE MISSES OUT LAST PART OF THE OPENING)
(VIDEO BELOW IS MY SPOKEN ANALYSIS OF THE OPENING)

In any opening of a film, we expect to be wowed and for it to engage us. We expect to be introduced very briefly to the characters and to understand the time and setting without it giving too much away about the rest of the film.

A lot of the things you find out in the opening of Back to the Future are inferences that you can make from the abundance of minor details littered throughout the first 5 minutes.

We can initially infer that time is a heavy feature of the film due to the clocks ticking and eventually finding out that Doc set them 25 minutes early. Our original question, as with any film, is ‘who are these people’ but this, in particular, also makes us question ‘why has he done this’, and ‘what does he want to achieve’. It also makes us question how he knew Marty was going to be in his house at the exact time at which he phoned. It creates a sense of confusion and the unknown in the chaotic mess of his home. The clothing, the radio and the other various electronics show us that it is not in our time, 1985 to be exact.

We find out that Marty, and Doc, are the main characters. We can only see Marty and so know that he is quite young and still in school. The way he turns everything on etc. makes him seem slightly irresponsible without a care in the world. However, this also tells us that he may be quite familiar with the house (as shown from him opening the door with the spare key under the mat). However, we don’t see Marty’s face until the medium shot when he plays the guitar and damages the amp. Before this we have a sense of intrigue as the close-ups make us question who this is and what he looks like, all we see are his feet.

The abundance of ambient noise, with the clocks ticking, the radio and the news station on, we find out various bits of information as we pan around the room. We also get minor details from the close-ups of newspaper clippings and things up on the wall. This helps us to try to understand the context of the film. For example, when we see the case of plutonium, it makes us question the characters, as we initially hear it has been stolen by terrorists.

The opening creates many questions, but doesn’t answer very many of them unless you are looking very carefully for certain things. There isn’t really any kind of establishing shot, but the radio and TV make up for this by setting the scene with little details. We also don’t find out much about the story or the characters, only what we can infer. This makes us more intrigued to continue watching the film. The phone call telling Marty to go to the mall in the middle of the night intrigues us also as we want to know what the mysterious man, we haven’t yet come across, has to show Marty in his ‘breakthrough’.