The Only Good Movie Trilogy

The rules for a movie trilogy are thus:

1) Make a self-contained movie.

2) If it’s good, make a sequel. Except break the sequel in half so you can span it across two movies.

End result: three movies, but only two (maybe two-and-a-half) storylines. You don’t have to examine the last twenty years of filmmaking very hard to see this formula used time and time again. There is, however, a third unwritten rule that nonetheless seems to consistently hold true:

3) Nobody likes part three as much as part one.

And there’s a reason for that! Since Part Three is usually just Part Two of Part Two, you don’t feel like you’re starting the story in the right spot. Jack Sparrow is already dead, see? And you’re dropped flat in the plotline of bringing him back. No time for the wind-up; from credits-go you’re smack in the middle of the pitch.

So I want to examine what might be considered the prototype for the modern movie trilogy, which is coincidentally the most recent trilogy that everyone can agree consists of three amazing movies: Back to the Future.

The hook of Back to the Future, of course, is time travel. And good movie trilogies need hooks, don’t they? Something to bind the series together in a cohesive way. The Matrix is about the world being a computer program, see. Pirates of the Caribbean is about pirates (usually in the Caribbean, though that point is negotiable).

What Back to the Future does, though, even in the very first movie, is abandons the hook in favor of its characters. Time travel is the crux of the story, but that’s not what the story is about. The story is about Marty McFly trapped thirty years in the past, having wacky adventures in order to insure his parents fall in love and that his old friend Doc doesn’t get murdered by terrorists.

So now it’s sequel time. The second movie uses the same hook as the first, but has to do it bigger and better. (Because it’s a sequel, see.) That’s why Batman has to fight two villains, or why Jigsaw’s traps have to become more and more complicated. The hook can’t be changed, so it has to expand. That gives us the first act of Back to the Future Part Two: our heroes are blasted into the future, and we get to see what our world looks like in 2015. (From the perspective of 1985. Heh.) Same hook: time travel. Except, bigger and badder.

That’s as far as most sequels take it, and why most sequels end up feeling limp compared to the original. Back to the Future Part Two, though… well, that’s just the beginning of the story. We’ve now established that time travel is bigger and badder, and gotten it out of the way. Now we can get back to the wacky adventures of Marty McFly. So where does a time travel adventure go? Immediate thoughts are populated with medieval knights and dinosaurs, aren’t they? Well, that’s not where the McFly story is. No, it’s back to 1955 with us — the same setting as the first movie — because that’s where the characters belong. That’s where the interesting things are happening.

It’s kind of a cheap shot, in a way. Second verse, same as the first? But it works. The layers of references and in-jokes that made the original so charming are just compounded here; now Marty is not only dealing with the juxtaposition of 1955 and 1985, but also his past and present self. In other words, the sequel arises organically out of the characters and their situations, rather than just adding more pirates or more matrix.

My favorite of the trilogy, though, is Back to the Future Part Three. This is where the trilogy really gets it right, especially compared to every other Part Three conceived by man. Let’s check it out.

First off, as I’ve mentioned, Part Three is really just Part Two of Part Two. And that is true in Back to the Future Part Three; at the end of Part Two Doc is accidentally sent back to the Old West, Marty is once again stranded in 1955, and heck, we even get a big “To Be Concluded…” message before the credits. The difference between that and, say, the downer ending of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is that the primary plot thread of Back to the Future Part Two had already been resolved. The MacGuffin had been located, the timestream had been restored.

At the end of Part Two you were excited to see Part Three, but you didn’t feel like you’d been cheated by only seeing half a movie.

So here we go into the final stretch of the trilogy. Once again we have our hook: time travel. And once again we have to go bigger and badder. In a lot of ways the Old West setting is every bit as gimmicky as the cheesy 2015 setting. You could also argue it’s every big as gimmicky as how the pirates leave the Caribbean in their Part Three, or how Neo gets magic matrix powers in the real world in his Part Three. You see the trap here: the hook is spreading thin, now, and has to expand in less believable ways. More pirates! More matrix!

More time travel! Yes, that’s true — but. Because Back to the Future Part Two so skillfully avoided being a movie series solely about its own gimmick, it has more room to expand. We’ve had a movie about Marty McFly’s wacky adventures, and a movie about breaking/restoring the timeline. What we haven’t yet explored is our other hero, Doc, and Part Three gives us the perfect chance to do so. Old, off-kilter, eccentric Doc. The poor guy doesn’t really fit in 1955 or 1985. Of course he’d invent a time machine.

In 1885 though? He looks right at home. He has friends, community ties, rivalries and a budding love interest. He’s not just the crazy old man in the lab on the hill; he’s an important, respected member of a blossoming American frontier town. The story here isn’t really about the Old West at all; it’s about Doc being torn between where he fits and where he belongs. It’s about his romantic interests and how they clash with his scientific ideals.

The thing about Doc is, in the first two movies, he talks a lot about the sanctity of time and how important its preservation is. When it comes down to the wire, though, his own curiosity always gets the best of him. He can’t help but read Marty’s note about his own death, any more than he can help bringing Marty and Jennifer to 2015, or striking up a conversation with his 1955-self even when he knows what the consequences could be. So when he winds up in 1855, where he could do who knows what kind of damage to the timeline, his instructions to Marty aren’t “come back and get me before I break something,” but rather “I’m content and you should leave me be.”

And that’s the hook for Back to the Future Part Three; the reversal of Marty and Doc’s roles. Now Doc wants to screw around with time and Marty wants to stop him. By this point in the trilogy the movies aren’t really about time travel, no more than they’ve ever been… rather, they’re about Marty and Doc, and the trouble they keep getting into.

That, right there, is the magic of a great movie trilogy, and why most of these modern ones keep missing the mark. The solution to Spider-Man 3 was to cram Venom into a plot where he didn’t belong, because they needed bigger and badder, and Venom was bigger and badder.  The solution to Pirates 3 was to have a French pirate and a Chinese pirate and an African pirate all in a great big pirate fortress with a pirate king and a pirate sea goddess and pirate magic and pirate lore. Somewhere in there were the stories of Peter Parker and Elizabeth Swan, but they were impossible to see for all the spectacle.

You can still see Marty and Doc, though, and it’s because they’re not fighting dinosaurs or medieval knights. The spectacle is them, and always has been. That’s what makes it the best movie trilogy.