As anyone knows, when you give Hollywood lemonade out of lemons, they want more and more lemonade, and usually more than needed to quench the public’s thirst. Zemeckis and company, faced with the prospect of a major hit and using said hit to ensure further artistic freedom for their career, played the Hollywood game and acquiesced to continue the adventures of Marty and Doc Brown. What is so fascinating about its sequel is its refusal to necessarily “up the ante”, as it spends most of its time re-treading over the success of the original, along with adding further doses of unpleasantries to the proceeding, as Reagan’s America is presented in full swing, and that damn Delorean is now causing more problems than solving them. Zemeckis gives you a sort of nightmare version of BACK TO THE FUTURE, showing how one slip up takes you out of the soda-jerk  nostalgia and into a horrifying mirror-reality suffocated by leopard-print, cheap cosmetics, and very relaxed open-carry laws. The magical qualities of the time machine have now pushed the sludge of capitalism in America to its extremes, as Biff rules Hilly Valley with a clenched fist full of cash. Make no mistake, this isn’t at the same level of the original, but what it delivers in terms of a studio-ordered sequel, is at least refreshingly cold and cynical.