When Buckaroo's Jet Car drives straight through a mountain thanks to his newly invented Oscillation Overthruster, it proves the existence of the 8th Dimension unfortunately, it also unlooses the Red Lectroids from Planet 10 (half-lobster, half-lizard, they are all klutz). The plot goes something like this: first, it turns out that the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" hoax way back in 1938 was not a hoax, but a beginning. When they're not saving the world from aliens or engaging in scientific breakthroughs, they play rock in seedy New Jersey bars as the Hong Kong Cavaliers. This time around, he's called Buckaroo Banzai, a neurosurgeon/race car driver/physicist/guitarist (in no particular order) and a scholar-hero who makes Indiana Jones look like nerd-meister Rick Moranis.īanzai is unflappable, sensitive, mystical and handsome (actor Peter Weller looks like a sharpened Rick Springfield) and, like Doc Savage or Robin Hood, he's surrounded by a magnificent band of merry men who go under the colors of Team Banzai: call them the More than Magnificent Seven. It's busy, but to paraphrase one of the Zen lines in the movie, "no matter where it goes, there you are."Įn route, Richter and Rauch have created a cool, enigmatic anti-hero for the mid-'80s, one who will reflect just about anything audiences are willing to read into him. It's obvious that Richter and Rauch found themselves unable to throw out any of the ideas that flitted through their overactive minds in the nine years it took to get "Banzai" to the screen. Since their art obviously belongs to dada, you may be excused your confusions.
Having concocted a scenario so densely layered that at film's end you're looking for a concordance rather than a credit list, Richter and Rauch don't ever look back.
BACKAROO BANZAI FULL
No such thing happens here: It's full thrust from frame one to the promise of more to come at the end.ĭrawn from sources as disparate as B-films and serials, pulp novels, comics and '50s television, and stocked by hardware that owes more to Popular Science than MIT, "Buckaroo Banzai" doesn't so much progress as unravel, but it does so in such a raucously ingenious and good-natured manner that one hardly cares. At least when George Lucas set you down in the middle of a galaxy far, far away he stepped back from time to time to explain, to clarify, to prepare. The surprising thing is that it works.īut so will you.
BACKAROO BANZAI MAC
Richter and writer Earl Mac Rauch have compounded it by throwing in a little bit of every cinematic genre (except ultra-gore) to the point that "Buckaroo Banzai" becomes the ultimate hyphenate: a comedy-sci-fi-Zen-western-adventure-rock-thriller. It's good box-office strategy, of course, and first-time director W.D. You'll probably enjoy it, maybe even love it, but you're not going to get the Big Picture until you've put at least two or three notches on your popcorn box.
Don't expect to see "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension" just once and be able to make sense of it.
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