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

Featured Audience Ratings

• AJ V

  
  This is a wacky sci-fi adventure comedy movie that's so strange you're not sure what genre it really belongs to or why they made the movie in the first place. It stars a lot of good actors, and they do an alright job, but the story is confusing and like I said, very odd.… More
  This is a wacky sci-fi adventure comedy movie that's so strange you're not sure what genre it really belongs to or why they made the movie in the first place. It stars a lot of good actors, and they do an alright job, but the story is confusing and like I said, very odd. Overall, it's okay.

• Jacob E

  
  This movie definitely falls into the cult film category. Definitely hit or miss, but I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. Give it a shot.

• Tim S

  
  Not the classic I was expecting. I spent much of the time trying to figure out who was who and what was going on. I still enjoyed it, nonetheless.

• Lafe F

  
  This movie tried to be so many things, with it's shocking assortment of characters and weird aliens. I couldn't get into much of it. Some hilights include the night club scene when Buckaroo first meets Penny, and the famous end credit sequence with driving music and an… More
  This movie tried to be so many things, with it's shocking assortment of characters and weird aliens. I couldn't get into much of it. Some hilights include the night club scene when Buckaroo first meets Penny, and the famous end credit sequence with driving music and an awesome parade of Team Banzai.

• xGary X

  
  Bizarre sci-fi/action/comedy that's got a tremendous cast but no structure or cohesive narrative to speak of. Self-conciously surreal, but never funny and has no drama to speak of as the script writer seems to have just been making it up as he went. Odd indeed.

• Steve K

  
  Bizarre, ridiculous film just gets better with age. Well ahead of it's time and still underappreciated.

• Dean M

  
  Oddest good movie with the polymath hero in this action-packed adventure in an outlandish world. Half of the movie seems to have been left on the cutting-room floor; the wrong half judging by what's left.

• Steve B

  
  The deuce, you say!

• Darik H

  
  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 lead… More
  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 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.

• Angela A

  
  Geeky awesomeness

• Nicky M

  
  Cult classic from the mid 80s whose cutting edge SFX are really showing their age. For a brain surgeon, scientist, rock star, comic book hero, adventurer that is good at so many things, he had trouble holding my attention. His attributes were so quickly gleamed over that none stood… More
  Cult classic from the mid 80s whose cutting edge SFX are really showing their age. For a brain surgeon, scientist, rock star, comic book hero, adventurer that is good at so many things, he had trouble holding my attention. His attributes were so quickly gleamed over that none stood out. However, goofy 80's over-excessivenes that are nonetheless fun hold this adventure serial type of sc-fi homage together and while I don't fully get the whole cult classic appeal of this flick, I understand that others would.

• Anthony V

  
  Get a sense of humor, monkey boy.

• Christopher B

  
  A perfect film. A comedic sci-fi genre mashup. Now where's Buckaroo Banzai vs The World Crime League? No matter where you go, there you are.

Read all 13 featured audience ratings