Far Out: ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension’ (1984)

This post is part of the Jeff Goldblum Blogathon, hosted by Realweemidget Reviews and Emma K Wall Explains It All. See the other posts here.

Faced with an indecipherable plot, I am occasionally tempted to cry, “It’s not rocket science!” In The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension, it really is—and brain surgery too.

Flamboyant and frequently bizarre, W.D. Richter’s film also finds room for doppelgängers, inter-dimensional travel and an indeterminate number of aliens all named John. I spent most of its running time asking, “What on Earth is going on?”

The film chronicles one episode in the career of Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller), famed neurosurgeon, physicist, inventor and adventurer, who arrives fashionably late for a test drive of his jet car (he was in surgery). Banzai picks up speed, then swerves off the track and heads straight for a nearby mountain, passing through solid rock into a netherworld of electron microscopy and trippy computer-generated landscapes. The test is also a trial run for the ‘oscillating overthruster’, a gadget Banzai and his colleague Professor Hikita (Robert Ito) developed, which opens a gateway between dimensions; when Banzai makes it back to normal space, he finds a red, fleshy sphere lodged in his car’s undercarriage, a specimen of alien life. But who exactly is the professor? How did he and Banzai meet? Also, Banzai has a band of friends and fellow adventurers—all good men, stout and true—but who are they? And why, if Banzai’s ancestry is partly Japanese, are they called the Hong Kong Cavaliers?

Watching Buckaroo Banzai is like watching an instalment of a serial having missed all the previous episodes. Richter and screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch drop us in medias res and get on with the plot; our confusion is part of the joke.

A psychedelic Doc Savage, the film becomes more knowingly absurd as it goes on. Banzai and his Cavaliers, who are also a successful rock group, perform in a cellar club so eighties it hurts: neon lights; synth; fog; wide collars; and even bigger hair. Suddenly, Banzai stops the show; somehow he senses someone isn’t having a good time. Her name is Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin) and she’s sobbing at a table at the back. Banzai sings a ballad especially for her. Perfect Tommy (Lewis Smith), presumably so named because of his catwalk strut, watches in confusion and whispers to a fellow Cavalier, “This is weird.” Yes this, not the other dimension or the aliens, is truly weird. The aliens themselves are all named John but have different last names. One, played by Christopher Lloyd, rejoices in the surname ‘Bigbooté’ and is touchy about the pronunciation. Bigbooté makes his first appearance kidnapping Hikita. Rawhide (Clancy Brown, always a welcome presence), who has the level-headed air of a journalist who wandered in from another film and decided to stay, radios Banzai to give him the bad news. “Aw, the deuce you say,” Banzai replies; Weller’s mournful deadpan is perfectly judged.

No character encapsulates Buckaroo Banzai’s eccentricities better than Banzai’s foe, Dr. Emilio Lizardo, brought to life by John Lithgow with a performance so unhinged it’s almost absurdist. Sporting rotting teeth and a shock of red hair, Lithgow doesn’t chew so much as tear off chunks of scenery and swallow them whole.  

Banzai’s world is outlandish in the extreme; thank goodness for Jeff Goldblum as the audience surrogate. A surgeon and eager newcomer to the Cavaliers, he rechristens himself New Jersey and shows up looking more like a buckaroo than Banzai himself: a cowboy hat; cowhide chaps; a spotless neckerchief; and a red buttoned shirt pilfered from the Pontipee brothers’ wardrobe. Goldblum gives him a sincere, endearingly nerdy charm, whether he’s deciphering his first clue or saying precisely what the audience is thinking. Walking through a laboratory at the Banzai Institute, he spots something incongruous and asks the natural question: “Why is there a watermelon there?” “I’ll tell you later,” another Cavalier replies.

That watermelon joke would fit comfortably into a Marvel film, where throwaway gags are as ubiquitous as enormous pillars of light. Buckaroo Banzai actually feels like a Marvel Cinematic Universe parody, with its dense plot and unexplained references to characters and events. This might also explain why it bombed at the box office: it was simultaneously too far behind the pulp serials and too far ahead of today’s superhero juggernauts. Still, a film this playful deserves an audience; over the years, it’s found one: Wes Anderson appropriated the end credits for the last scene of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which incidentally, co-stars Jeff Goldblum.

Did I have the faintest idea what was happening in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension? No. Did I enjoy the ride? Sometimes, yes.