I did see it in the theater, though I was 8 and the story was incomprehensible to me.
#BACKAROO BONZI TV#
Emilio Lizardo/Lord John Whorfin (John Lithgow) gets an electric fix.Īll this is to say that the film was a big flop at the box office, and found its audience over home video and TV airings. The party goes on with or without you the film knows it will find the ones who “get it.” And if you’re indifferent, well, one of the Black Lectroids makes the film’s position clear when he closes Buckaroo Banzai with, “So what? Who cares?”ĭr. Therefore, watching the film is like crashing a party where you don’t know anyone there. Most of the cast, be they human or alien, never receive proper introductions, but have a unique wardrobe and a memorable name. Most of the time he doesn’t need to do much but stand there, look Zen, and say things like “Wherever you go…there you are.” Relaxed style and cool amidst the blatantly insane is what Buckaroo Banzai is all about. That the whiter-than-white Peter Weller cannot possibly embody all these requirements is one of the film’s many droll jokes.
Just before dropping us right into Banzai’s latest experiment to drive his jetcar through a mountain and into the 8th dimension, some scrolling text explains that he’s a brilliant, half-Japanese neurosurgeon, martial arts expert, particle physicist, and rock ‘n’ roller, always accompanied by his companions, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Building upon the renewed interest in serialized pulp following Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark – the trend was the only reason this film was greenlit in the first place – Buckaroo Banzai acts like the umpteenth chapter in an ongoing Doc Savage-style saga.
#BACKAROO BONZI MAC#
Yet the end result is just as weird and cluttered as Richter and screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch ( New York, New York) wanted it to be.
Richter (who had written the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and would go on to write Big Trouble in Little China) tangled with the head of the production company, a man who believed a hero should never wear glasses (Buckaroo got to keep his, barely) and that the film shouldn’t look as good as Blade Runner (DP Jordan Cronenweth was inexplicably fired). The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a deeply strange blend of genres and styles, a film of raw imagination and improbable swagger that somehow escaped to theaters in 1984.
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