Great Scott! Forget 'Back to the Future,' Reston Basically Already Hill Valley

We learned this week that, as part of the Washington West Film Festival and its celebration of the fact that we've arrived at the October 2015 "future" that Back to the Future II portrayed way back in the eighties, Fairfax County is kinda sorta officially changing the name of Reston to Hill Valley from Oct. 21-25.

It's a nice gesture -- and we hear Doc Brown might be at our very own Bow Tie Cinema as part of the festivities! But it's also sort of moot. You see, Reston is already basically Hill Valley, ca. 2015. SRSLY, as the movie didn't guess the kids of 2015 might have said a few years earlier.

 Consider the scene where Marty McFly gets his first glimpse of "Hill Valley" in 2015. To his shock and horror, he finds a disorienting, artificial-looking downtown full of name-brand chains.

   

 Funny, that sounds familiar:

 Right down to the movie theater:

 But the similarities don't stop there!
   
Toll Road.

 Beyond Hill Valley's gleaming prefab downtown, housing developments that are, shall we say, showing their age:

 
 Those cabinets are pure 1970s Reston.

 Lots of talk about density.

 
 And then there's this:


Okay, so maybe that part's just crazy.