I like the way Thing is being used here. Opens up whole new phrase possibilities…
“Go Thing Yourself, Asshole!”
“Thing Me, Baby!”
“Watch This! Thing My Beer!”
“I Thing You”
“All Your Thing Are Belong To Us”
You actually can find some footage of Stoltz as Marty. Granted, the film is so flawless and iconic it’s hard to imagine anyone BUT Fox being perfect… but yeah, Stoltz just isn’t right.
Uh, no.
I love it, I watch it all the time, but “flawless” it ain’t.
- Where did “other Marty” go?
- Marty is not going to fit in, he doesn’t know anything about his own life. They just ignored that.
- bonus: if Lorraine was so fond of the name “Marty” why did they wait until their third kid to use it?
(Columbo-Thing turns and tentacles sprout out of his mouth:)
“Just one more Thing…”
#3 is relatively easy to answer. The older brother may have been named after a recently deceased relative or friend to “honor” that friend (I have some cousins where the Jr. Child is actually the 2nd for this very reason, first was named after their dead father) and the sister obviously wouldn’t be named Marty.
-
“Other Marty” didn’t go anywhere. He’s still stuck in a timeline where Biff reigns over his gambling empire and Lorraine has a massive fake rack. FWIW, I think that might actually be our world.
-
Marty already doesn’t fit in. He seems lost and clueless long before he goes back in time, and his only friend is an ‘eccentric scientist’ who doesn’t actually seem to understand how anything actually works. If Tobey McGuire and Reece Witherspoon can figure out how to live in a ‘Fifties sitcom that was colorized by sex and Ted Turner, Marty can figure out Alt-1985 where he has too-cool-to-be-believed parents, a rad Toyota 4x4, and a soon-to-be-upgraded-to-Liz-Shue girlfriend. He’s just fine.
-
Lorraine totally forgot about ‘Marty’ which is a side-effect of dislocations of the time stream; this is also why nobody recalls some weird kid that showed up in town wearing a life preserver who created quite a stir, dumped a load of manure on town bully Biff Tannen, and just happens to look like this kid born fifteen years later. When the McFlys got to kid #3 Lorrainehad a fever dream while in labor where she recalled a boy that came from the future and and convinced her to give up her wayward ways to be with George, and when she awoke to find that her dream was true she decided to name the kid ‘Marty’ after the vague memory that she couldn’t place.
But Professor Hulk explains it all:
Stranger
But he REALLY doesn’t fit in. Like he doesn’t know he has a truck. OK. Where are the keys? Does he have a license? (Did “original” Marty even have one? No evidence either way*, but he sure isn’t a great driver.) If he does, does he even have the same birthday?
What else doesn’t he know? Does he have the same classes? the same friends? (“hey Marty you said you were coming over to play Atari. What happened?” Marty, thinking: Who is this kid?)
Have he and Jennifer “did it” yet? Gonna be a surprise for someone if he guesses wrong.
When Linda says “Marty pick me up after school”, where will he go? Ask her? “What’s with you, you know where I work, you dropped me off yesterday!”
He doesn’t know what his family do for a living, what their interests are, where Uncle Joey is, and a million other details. Any one of which if he got wrong would show him to be “off”. Does he even have a Huey Lewis poster in his room?
And the butterfly effect could change a lot of things. Since neither George or Biff work…wherever the hell they worked in the beginning of the film, who works there now? Do they have kids in school?
*eta: Maybe he showed his license to young Doc. If so, I retract that one bit. Thank you.
That’s utterly laughable, because the movie then went on and violated every time travel rule that they themselves just set down!
The movie is a timey-wimey mess, and not in a good, or clever way. It’s just a mess.
Back on target, I really need to rewatch The Thing. It’s been since it was new. Some of the things you all are mentioning I have completely forgotten. All I remember is it scared the crap out of me.That ending was a killer.
Question
11 are mentioned. none of whom are
Who is Norris?
The curly-haired guy who developed a nasty case of head-spider. Interestingly, the actor said he tried to play it as if he thought he might be “Thinged” and wasn’t sure of himself.
The guy who had the heart attack and died (or “died”), then had his chest turn in a giant chomping toothy maw when Copper tried to defibrillate him. It gets worse form there.
Apparently not because the Huey Lewis & The News song “The Power of Love” isn’t to be found in the next two movies. Apparently the consequences of Marty going back in time eliminated them from his future timestream. I think that is a consequence everybody can live with. It isn’t like he eradicated the music of Bach or killed Muddy Waters.
“But—and I’m only saying this because I care—there are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.”
Stranger
Wait, he… Wanted to rename it “Space Man from Pluto”… because he wanted to avoid being pigeonholed as “genre”? Does he, um, know what any of those words mean?
And so Patrick Bateman had to choose some other band for inspiration. Also, to jump back on topic, the Thing prequel was so disappointing!
The acting wasn’t terrible (I’ll pretty much watch Mary Elizabeth Winstead in anything) but the story hewed so close to the original film that it offered no real surprises, and the decision to move to primarily unconvincing CGI effects with some non-functional practical appliances removed the visceral horror of the original. The biggest problem, of course, is that you know how it is going to end, so there is absolutely no tension versus the original film where you don’t know who is going to survive. (Carpenter turned convention on its head by having at least one black character actually survive to the end of the film, which was also quite deliberate.)
This film, like Solo: A Star Wars Story, is an argument against making prequels just for the sake of filling in backstory that didn’t need to be explained to an attentive audience.
Stranger
She should be in more things IMHO. And agreed, some blanks don’t need to be filled in for me. Likewise with Predator and Aliens: I don’t need to know more. Once and done is fine! Leave a little mystery!
I guess the moral is just be glad you didn’t get The Thing Vs. Predator Plus More Aliens.
Stranger
Give it time….
I think I get what he means, actually. “Back to the Future” is the name of a science fiction movie. “Space Man from Pluto” is the name of a farce with some sci-fi trappings. The former only interests geeks and weirdos. The latter is good mainstream fun. He’s trying to Lost in Space it.
-reads Miller’s post, and attempts to process it-
Excuse me, I think I’m leaking some brains. Or a three eyed alien ripped off the top of my skull.