Back to the Future Part II is of a genre.
Adventure films are a genre of film . Back to the Future . In 2007 , the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry , and in June 2008 the American Film Institute 's special AFI 's 10 Top 10 designated the film as the 10th-best film in the science fiction genre . Back to the Future Part II is a 1989 American science-fiction adventure comedy film directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Bob Gale . Comedy is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humor . One of the oldest genres in film , some of the very first silent movies were comedies , as slapstick comedy often relies on visual depictions , without requiring sound . Comedy , compared with other film genres , puts much more focus on individual stars , with many former stand-up comics transitioning to the film industry due to their popularity . Science fiction film ( or sci-fi ) is a genre that uses speculative , fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science , such as extraterrestrial lifeforms , alien worlds , extrasensory perception and time travel , along with futuristic elements such as spacecraft , robots , cyborgs , interstellar travel or other technologies . The genre has existed since the early years of silent cinema , when Georges Melies ' A Trip to the Moon ( 1902 ) employed trick photography effects . The next major example in the genre was the film Metropolis ( 1927 ) - being the first feature length science fiction movie . From the 1930s to the 1950s , the genre consisted mainly of low-budget B movies . After Stanley Kubrick 's landmark 2001 : A Space Odyssey ( 1968 ) , the science fiction film genre was taken more seriously .