What’s so hard to believe about this movie is that it wasn’t created as a period piece. Because, like, you know how when Marty McFly goes back to 1955, they do all this “look how wacky 1955 was!!!” stuff? ST4 does all that with 1987. It’s like “YELLOW PAGES, haha, remember those? OMG BOOMBOXES, so hilarious. Oh yeah, and remember how shitty old Macs were? OH GOD CHECK OUT THESE CARS… oh shit, that’s right, the Cold War was still going on then, so Russians were suspicious” etc.

But it is set in the time that it was made! The people making it thought of those things as basically normal. We weren’t supposed to share the ST crew’s puzzlement at these archaic things, we were supposed to be laughing at how hapless the crew was in the face of utterly normal everyday stuff. It seems hard to believe that the movie would even work that way, but I remember that it did.

Anyway, my conclusion is that if you’re going to make a movie set in the present day, put in time travelers from the future who are confused by everything so that your future audiences will have a POV to relate to.