The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
(Youtube Streaming, September 2020) This may count as my second viewing of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, except that my first viewing, decades ago, left me with disconnected, confused memories. Not that this second viewing is any different because this film really feels as if it’s a mashup of about six different movies thrown in a blender, with the protagonist somehow inheriting the characteristics of all six leads. Buckaroo Banzai, after all, is a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and rock star whose various specialties (and equally diverse collaborators) are ideally suited to detecting and countering an alien invasion of Earth. Filled with non sequiturs, outrageous contrivances, deadpan humour and bizarre combinations of tossed-off awesomeness, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a cult classic in the purest sense: It’s going to be incomprehensible to most, and beloved by a few. I’m firmly but not obsessively in the second camp—this is brilliant, off-beat stuff, the likes of which only the 1980s were capable of producing. Peter Welles is unflappable in the lead role, while Jeff Goldblum is hilarious as a supporting player, and John Lithgow chews all the scenery he can find in what feels like an audition for 3rd Rock From the Sun. Even its dearest fans will tell you that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension has the flaws of its qualities: that it’s ridiculously undisciplined and that at least another script rewrite to bring it all into focus would have produced wonders. But when it works (or rather, if it works), then it really works. The biggest surprise, frankly, is why there hasn’t been a remake since then—this strikes me as the ideal fixer-upper; the best Doc Savage film ever made under another name. Even thirty-five years later, we still stare at it in awe.