The movie seems to concern a middle-class high school student, Charles J. Fox (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science), and a mad scientist, Christopher Lloyd (Foul Play, Caddyshack, Fletch). The two go for a ride in the scientist's DeLorean sports car, and then the student gets in trouble with his parents. Or something like that -- the movie is so chaotic that the viewer finds it difficult to figure out exactly what is going on.
For example, one moment Fox is driving around in a parking lot, then the viewer turns to his girlfriend to talk about dinner plans and looks up to find the student staring at a farmer in the middle of nowhere. Later, when the viewer returns to his seat with some hot dogs and popcorn, he sees a strange, seemingly incestuous conversation between Fox and his mother (maybe his sister?). Still later, after the viewer has moved to a better seat, Fox is in a concert hall playing electric guitar, even though he was banned from the concert early in the film. And all through the movie, whenever the viewer looks up from trying to quiet the baby he is sitting, he notices all sorts of inconsistent details: the town square looks completely different in different scenes; the same people will sometimes drive recent-model sedans and later drive dated jalopies; and characters' ages and relationships to one another seem to shift randomly.
The only conclusion the viewer can draw is that Future is the most drugged-out movie since Caddyshack. The screenwriter must have been on hallucinogens to produce such an incomprehensible plot. Many of the actors must have been strung out or nearing the D-T's to have looked so bad in some of their scenes. Even the film editor and director must have been on mind-deadening substances to have assembled some of the scenes so obviously out of order.
The producer of Future, Steven Spielberg (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, One From The Heart) has built a reputation as one of the "cleanest" filmmakers in Hollywood, but this incoherent, uneven movie shows that even he has succumbed to the terrible drug dependency that continues to ravage Hollywood.
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(Updated August 23, 1998.)