I recently bought the Back To The Future trilogy DVD set from eBay – it arrived in a slightly bizarre piece of packaging which made me suspect it was pirated, but it turns out that it’s the official Australian version of the DVD set (Region 2 and 4 compatible). Managed to save a few pounds off the Play.com price, so I was happy.
The DVD set itself is unremarkable; it has some reasonably good special features and funny outtakes, but nothing exceptional. The image quality is a bit disappointing but then again, the films aren’t particularly new. Not that this really matters, because once again my belief that Back To The Future (part 1) is one of the very best science fiction movies out there.
And SF it is! It might not seem like SF – after all, it’s funny, charming and very entertaining, and it doesn’t involve spaceships or aliens. But it has got time travelling. It reminds me of some of the older ‘golden age’ SF, from the 50s and 60s, written by people like Clarke; good humoured SF that was rooted in reality and didn’t involve reams of technobabble or depressing visions of the future. I like hard SF just as much as anyone else, but sometimes it’s nice to read a light and funny SF story – of which there are still a fair number, but most of them are short stories.
mssv 