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Picture
Brain surgeon and rock star Buckaroo Banzai and his team of
​crime fighters must face an alien threat from the 8th Dimension.
COMEDY/SCI-FI

The Adventures of
Buckaroo Banzai Across
the 8th Dimension
 
(1984)

Directed by W.D. Richter

Written by Earl Mac Rauch

Starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin,
Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Lewis Smith, Robert Ito,
​Carl Lumbly, Clancy Brown, Pepe Serna, Matt Clark

Connor Eyzaguirre
February 13, 2019
6/10
Buckaroo Banzai might just be the weirdest film I've seen to date, and that's not necessarily a compliment. It's a film with so many competing ideas thrown together that nothing makes a lick of sense in the finished product. I assume it was meant to be a satire of films like Flash Gordon and Mad Max, but with such a layered and hard to follow plot, the satirical element gets lost in place of jokes without nuance and one-dimensional characters. Having just watched it, I can tell you I'd probably have trouble describing the plot.

Peter Weller is world famous rock star/brain surgeon/adventurer Buckaroo Banzai, a man with so much talent that it's no wonder he's a scientist as well. Banzai has been working with a Japanese scientist to create an oscillation overthruster, a device which allows for interdimensional travel. This catches the attention of Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow, the only saving grace), who is secretly an alien war criminal who wants to use the device to conquer his homeworld. What follows is a lot of jumbled ideas that shows Earl Mac Rauch never wrote a second draft and crammed every cool idea he had about the movie into just under two hours. It's abstract, overly-complicated, and at times, insincere in all the wrong places.

I wanted to like this film, but the only thing I really enjoyed was the performances. The concept was way out there, and you can tell actors like Lithgow and Jeff Goldblum are just enjoying themselves. Buckaroo Banzai is too ambitious for its own good, and has achieved cult status after failing commercially, and after seeing the film, it's obvious to me why that happened.

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