Back to the Future

I saw Back to the Future today. It ranks up there with Rush Hour 2 as one of my favourite films. It's ingeniously crafted, everything fits so well together.

Apart from being a blast, Back to the Future has a little philosophy in it too. It reminded me of this post and Candide (it must've been a decade since I read it).

Candide shows how absurd the idea that "everything is for the best" is. Religious people nowadays often seem to be of a similar passive ilk to Candide, when they qualify what they say with "God willing" and think God has a scheme behind all suffering -- if it happens it must be God's will and some greater good must come of it (however unfathomable it is to us lesser beings).

In Tika's post linked above, she says that works like Candide helped give us the modern world. Candide shows people that they don't have to passively accept "God's will" and that they should actively improve their lot (easier said than done I suppose).

In Back to the Future, Marty changes his parent's past and changes his family's lives for the better. Nowadays, Michael J. Fox campaigns for stem cell research to help cure genetic diseases, in an effort to roll back "God's will" and make countless lives better.

You have to respect those people who /actively/ fight and struggle against all odds in a bid to change our presents and futures for the better.