The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

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  January 25, 2009

  evillincoln

  This movie was kind of spectacularly terrible in a way that makes me baffled at how it ever got made, who read the script and was like, yes, I want to star in this movie, only 1984 could have produced such a bizarre thing.

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• 
  
  December 16, 2008

  hypathio7

  I didn't get this. It wasn't as fun as the posters and video case label and hype make it sound.

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• 
  
  October 23, 2008

  StaisilD

  Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller), who is, to say the least, multi-talented. Brain surgeon, rock star, theoretical physicist, action hero, and the star of his own line of semi-biographical comic books. Buckaroo's interdimensional experiments with his new invention, the Operation Ove...( read more)rthruster, throw Earth into an alien war, and he finds himself with scant hours to save the world. Peter Weller, as Banzai, gets to play to his strengths, though in his case it's an icy-cool deadpan heroism, quiet, calm, and rigid. But Jeff Goldblum is certainly the most memorable here as a new recruit to Banzai's team. Director W.D. Richter keeps things moving as breathlessly as possible, sometimes too fast for us to absorb everything, learn character names, or even allow certain sentences to be finished. A pleasing draught of old-fashioned serial adventure clichés.

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• 
  
  November 10, 2007

  cowmageddon

  So cheesy, it's Velveeta!

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• 
  
  August 14, 2007

  franktowers

  weird, goldblum is his usual self and yeah its just weird, suppose to be one of them cult movies

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• 
  
  August 29, 2009

  dazmcc

  Brilliant. Just brilliant.

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• 
  
  August 24, 2009

  itbegins2005

  Buckaroo Banzai: neurosurgeon, particle physics engineer, martial arts master, rock and roll star, consultant to the President, and head of the influential Banzai Institute. Has there ever been a cooler character to appear on the silver screen? While it is true that the eponymous...( read more) lead of the film is a fantastic bit of comical exaggeration, and that many of the characters surrounding him are just as strange and uniquely interesting, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension suffers from a serious, fatal flaw: it literally does not have anything resembling a coherent plot. The funny thing about this is that, at first, this is a great asset; the film is at its best at the beginning, when crazy concepts are tossed about with wild abandon, a random melange of wackiness with no form or structure to it. The problems come when the bizarre mish-mash of ideas thrust upon the screen finally do resolve themselves towards a specific dramatic destination; its as if the film becomes lackluster and uninteresting BECAUSE of its attempts to pull itself together into something more lucid, rather than in spite of this. The story, such as it is, begins when Banzai and his crew of scientists and engineers construct a jet-car that, through the use of a lazer channeling energy through the ingenious device called an Oscillation Overthruster, pierces the barrier between our world and the Eighth Dimension, a formless, electric limbo. Banzai soon discovers that he has inadvertantly opened a doorway for the malevolent Red Lectroids, an alien race from Planet Ten who are imprisoned in the dimension and whose remaining agents, led by Dr. Emilio Lizardo (alias John Whorfin), a scientist possessed by a Lectroid during an initial experiment with the 8th dimension, need the Overthruster to free their comrades and return to Planet Ten to rule over the benevolent Black Lectroids. In response, the Black Lectroids present Banzai with an ultimatum: stop the Red Lectroids from succeeding, or the Black Lectroids will instigate World War III. Or something like that. Leading the charge against this indecipherable onslaught of insanity is Peter Weller as the good Dr. Banzai himself, a man so immersed in the bizarre that he regards everything with cool scientific objectivity, no matter how outlandish it may be. Weller is the grounding force for the movie, the straight man to the plot's clown, even though his character is just as extreme as any other in the film; combining bits of a tweed-wearing professor with a rock-and-roll star, he projects an air of cool confidence that never goes too over-the-top- though it does go just over-the-top enough to fit into the movie (only Peter Weller could deliver a line like "Oh... the deuce, you say" without sounding like a moron). On the other side of the spectrum, you get John Lithgow going completely nutty as Dr. Emilio Lizardo, a scientist possessed by the interdimensional alien John Whorfin. With a preposterous accent, ghoulish appearance, and perpetually hunching, sinister gait, Lithgow plays the villain-as-cartoon, the zany bad guy stereotype who's more a bungler than a threat to anyone. Lithgow claimed to be going for a Dr. Caligari, silent-film presence with the character, and he does well with the operatic-ness (is that a word?) of the guy, which, on the screen, just makes him funnier. The rest of the cast, which includes Clancy Brown, Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Lloyd, are pretty much just along for the ride, as the plot zig-zags in bizarre directions, from the revelation that Orson Welles' broadcast on Halloween 1938 was, in fact, real, to the discovery of sinister Red Lectroid sleeper agents at a press conference (with the accompanying dialogue "THERE! EVIL PURE AND SIMPLE BY WAY OF THE EIGHTH DIMENSION!"). The special effects are pretty decent by the standards of the time (a lot of lightning effects pepper the film), though I think the spaceship models were intentionally made to look fake- and if so, bravo; the fact is, the plot stretches credibility so much that feasable special effects are completely unnecessary- it's SUPPOSED to look stupid (though I can't help but think that Banzai's rock-star get-up was actually supposed to be cool at the time). The music is... painfully bad. Synthesizers were never my thing, and this movie is rife with them; I always thought they served to lessen the dramatic impact of music rather than enhance it. Sure, the joke is that the music is supposed to be "futuristic", but come on, they could have done better than that. The fact is, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension is kind of a mixed bag, with its uniquely dry sense of humor sometimes working marvelously and other times falling flat on its face (the original opening being a sterling example of the latter). Still, it is an immensly enjoyable trek through the depths of science fictional absurdity, one that merrily pokes fun at all the pretentions and cliches of the genre while playing the whole thing straight throughout. It ultimatlely comes across as the most bizarre, over-the-top sci-fi movie serial you've ever seen, kind of an anti-Star Wars. It may take some getting used to, but there's a quirky, hilarious film here, made just for the kind of high-brow sci-fi fans who may have forgotten just how absurd this genre really is.

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• 
  
  August 11, 2009

  herecomesthemoney69

  Was some weird ass 80s shit here. Story was stupid and the aliens looked pretty lame but did have some sort of coolness to it, I bet this is probably a cult classic.

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• 
  
  July 29, 2009

  leguy60653

  this is one funny movie.

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• 
  
  July 28, 2009

  crichardson5

  Sad no sequel ever materialized (except for a quasi-related movie "Big Trouble in Little China")

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• 
  July 16, 2008

  kozureokami

  It's not my planet, monkeyboy.
• 
  February 13, 2007

  ekgjester9

  It's like a train wreck in the making composed entirely of one-liners. You feel a bit guilty and wrong for doing it... but you HAVE to watch.

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