Turning the big 3-0 is always a big deal, but for Back to the Future it’s particularly so. After all, 30 years is the time span that sets the whole movie in motion: Marty McFly travels three decades back in time from 1985 to 1955. Now, on July 3, 2015, he’ll have made it just that many years into the future. (Or, rather, the movie will have made it: the 2015 date to which Marty zooms in the movie’s sequel won’t roll around until October.)
Looking back at TIME’s original review of the movie classic (a two-fer that paired BttF with Goonies) it’s clear that the charm of the story was immediately clear—and that critic Richard Corliss had his finger on the pulse, or at least his foot on the gas of the film-criticism DeLorean. When looking at the plot structure, he ventured a guess at what might happen to the movie by 2015:
At this point, we don’t need a flux capacitor to guess that, another 30 years from now, that prediction will still hold true.
Read the full review, here in the TIME Vault: This Way to the Children’s Crusade
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Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com