Banzai Buckaroo!

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai - Across the 8th Dimension! is a movie I desperately want to like more than I actually do. I well remember seeing this clever little science fiction adventure flick when it hit theaters in the 80's, playing one of the best art houses in the city I was centered around at the time. It's got all the elements of a wacky adventure, perfectly designed for my wheelhouse. Sadly, it falls short in a number of ways despite its best elements.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai - Across the 8th Dimension! is a movie which I have like always but which has aged with me rather well. I remember seeing this clever little science fiction adventure flick when it hit theaters in the 80's, playing one of the best art houses in the city I was centered around at the time. It's got all the elements of a wacky adventure, perfectly designed for my wheelhouse. 

The pulp roots of this movie are all too evident. Peter Weller is a dandy actor portraying a modern "Renaissance Man" in this story, a sensitive noble genius expert in medicine, physics, and the secrets of a woman's heart. Weller brings a twinkle to the part, a gleam which helps sell what could be a load of crap for a lesser talent. This is a Doc Savage of sorts for the then modern and self-aware hipster world of the MTV generation. It's got all the parts right, and Weller almost pulls it off.

(Buckaroo, the Cavaliers and More)

The Hong Kong Cavaliers are the Fab Five (and more) of course, featuring a fine array of second banana talent (Clancy Brown - who I always like, Jeff Goldblum - who is always dorky and entertaining, and other blokes whose faces are better known than their names alas). They help Banzai battle the threats to mankind when they aren't doing their Huey Lewis and News imitation in a local night club.

(The Red Lectroids)

The threat to Earth this time are the "Red Lectroids" who came to our luckless planet from the 8th Dimension way back in 1938 and convinced media phenom Orson Welles to help them cover it all up as a Halloween prank. Hidden among us all this time as hideously stiff white men (Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli are fun), these aliens are led by Lord John Whorfin (John Lithgow) who took over the body of a great scientist named Lizardo some years before. Now they want to return to their own planet and take over with the spaceship they've constructed here. Their enemies the "Black Lectroids" want to stop them and engage Banzai to help.

It's a whirlwind of activity from that point on, and not all of the furious motion pays off especially well. A reasonably sexy Ellen Barkin shows up as a sort of love interest for Banzai but seems hard pressed to find a role in the plot save as obligatory damsel in distress. There's much jumping and mugging and lots of overly wrought ironic dialogue for everyone. The downside with this movie is it's too aware of itself for its own good. The smarmy not-so-subtle commentary on then modern life is a shade too heavy handed to be as incisive as the creators' desire. The irony drips, but not always where they'd like and often in way too much quantity. The movie is hurt too by a limited budget which saddles it with local discovered real-world sets that don't really convince. Running around peculiar factories was de rigueur in 80's movies and there's plenty of that here.

Having said that about the movie, I am much impressed with the novelization by Earl Mac Rauch which adds a great deal of texture and depth to the proceedings. The story is told from the point of view of Reno, one of the Cavaliers who plays a moderate role in the film, but is not necessarily central. The larger universe in which Buckaroo operates is hinted at with mentions of Hanoi Xan, a villain of the first order and Buckaroo's arch nemesis. We get little about him, but he is certainly connected to the primary tale we know from the movie in that he assisted the Red Lectroids in their scheming. The end of Buckaroo Banzai promises a sequel in which the team confronts The World Crime League. 

That story would take forty years to appear and it's a whopper. I haven't read the story as of yet as it clocks in at well over six hundred pages. Rauch luxuriates in the details, almost to a fault. I'll get there one day...I hope Buckaroo. 

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