In this trailer of Back to The Future by Spielberg, the viewers see the main character slowly walk into what looks like a highly advanced car and activates it, turning on all the lights on the car. The car then asks him how far he will go, giving an answer of about 30 years. The car then takes off, leaving fire in its tracks.
Travelling off into the future would be a cool concept if we could develop it in the future. I could go into the future and look at how society has evolved, maybe also look at some lottery numbers while I’m there. Time travelling does present a myriad of problems though. The future would constantly change if people were time travelling back and forth. If a person time travelled, then the future he or she would see would be a future where the person was gone for however many years they decided to skip out on. When they come back, the future has already changed; it now accommodates that one extra person that went missing for however many years. Also, if people brought back technology from the future, then the future would change drastically; it could be in ruins, or be even more prosperous. Also, bring back lottery numbers would dramatically change the future, and/or cause the lottery to go out of business. Though, going to the future is a way to assess the future situation of a problem and develop ways to combat that situation. If, for example, global warming, became much more of a force in the future, we could develop ways to fight it in the present day so that that future wouldn’t exist anymore.
The purpose behind the creation of such a movie would probably be to explore the concept of time travelling; the main character in the trailer is seen travelling through time with a time machine car, explicitly showing that purpose. For a long time, we have been interested in what the future holds for us. Will we get into college? Will we have a happy life and family? Will we have a good job or strike it rich? These are all questions that we could find out if we had access to the future. But to do that, we create paradoxes within the present timeline, and possibly damage the time-space continuum. The movie does make us think about the interesting things we could do in the future, but through the potential conflicts that could arise, the audience can understand also the negative side of time travel.
One way the film trailer manipulates people into going to the theaters to watch it would actually be the lack of content in this trailer. There are only two sentences ever spoken in this trailer, and the rest was just dramatic build-up. But it works to the filmmaker’s advantage; by not giving a lot of info right away, they appeal to their audience’s natural curiosity about the film, as well as its contradictory title, with the words “back” and “future” (future is associated with going forwards). The flashy lights on the car, as well as the fire effect left behind by the car, provide that “coolness” factor of the movie, at least for the time that it was made in.
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