THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8th DIMENSION (1984)

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a film so delightfully off-kilter that everything—each scene and every quotable exchange of dialogue—has something strange about it, served up in a way that makes it more interesting than need be. It’s almost impossible to provide a cogent summary of the plot and it’s not easy to define it by genre. There’s no doubt that it’s science fiction but the movie carves out its own subgenre. Among other things, it could also be called an unconventional comedy and a matinee-style action adventure. It uses and abuses a busload of tropes which only serve to highlight its similarities to and differences from other genres. It’s one of very few films that can be called unique.

It’s also one of the most perfectly cast films with a set of uncommonly talented actors caught just before achieving their deserved stardom. Front and centre there’s Peter Weller, who would soon become RoboCop (1987) for Paul Verhoeven, and Jeff Goldblum’s offbeat delivery is probably what landed him the Blundlefly lead for David Cronenberg’s update of The Fly (1986). Ellen Barkin was yet to sizzle in The Big Easy (1986), and Christopher Lloyd was poised to create the mad genius, Dr Emmet Brown in Back to the Future (1985).

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (from here on simply Buckaroo Banzai) is pretty much the definitive cult movie and seems like it was knowingly conceived as such. A handful of viewers adored it the first time around but most just didn’t get it. Its theatrical run was a spectacular flop but it flourished in what was then the new and vibrant home video market. Those who fell in love with it and its crazy cast of characters kept on watching it and showing it to their select circles of friends. This feeling of family is part of what makes a true cult movie and, slowly but surely, a disparate community grew around it.

It wasn’t long before these small fan groups started gathering for mini-conventions and the first Buckaroo Banzai fanzines were being made and handed around. Marvel had already recognised the potential and published a two-shot comic book adaptation to coincide with its release—so, can we assimilate Buckaroo Banzai into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)? The end credits promised a sequel but, although a screenplay was drafted, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League never materialised. Not for want of trying.

Most recently, Kevin Smith (Mallrats) pitched a two-season TV series, with Amazon Studios ready to get on board. He planned to reboot the original film as the first season and follow up with season two becoming the long-awaited sequel. There was much fan excitement, but the property has changed hands a few times and certain rights have lapsed, leaving it in a bigger tangle than the film’s plot. Perhaps this would be a good opportunity for the flagging MCU to refresh itself as I am sure their lawyers could sort something out!

When I first saw Buckaroo Banzai on rental VHS, I assumed it was inspired by a long-running comic book series. I made that assumption based on several factors. Firstly, it had that quirky quality and presented a bunch of fully formed and distinct characters that just felt like they had a prior life in another format – maybe because a variety of, albeit unfinished, scripts had already been written over several years. Secondly, within the story, these characters are already famous for their serialised exploits in the Buckaroo Banzai adventure magazines and comic books—after all, that’s how the aliens knew who to come to for help. Thirdly, the narrative and visual structure are framed as a series of episodes and vignettes, each having a different feel just like the segments of a comic serial—perhaps because there was a change of cinematographer during production when Jordan Cronenweth was replaced by Fred J. Koenekamp.

Plus, the plot is as inventive and convoluted as anything from the realms of comics, with its tightly woven intricacy compressed into a lean 103 minutes that’s worthy of an entire season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-2020)—which has many similarities in both content and format. Except that instead of Zephyr One, Buckaroo’s mobile command centre is known as World Watch One and is on board the swish tour bus of The Hong Kong Cavaliers, his rock-and-roll band. Ah, so he’s a rock star? Yes, but that’s just a sideline. He’s really a world-renowned neurosurgeon… a physicist, test pilot, engineer, inventor, and the president’s scientific adviser… did I mention aliens?

There is more than one cut of the finished film, with the theatrical release being a trimmed version, but I’ll be referring to the extended version that surfaced on DVD in 2001, again as a bonus disc with the 2016 Blu-ray in the US. It’s also slated for a UK Blu-ray release this November to celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary.

We first meet a young Buckaroo (siblings Greg and Matthew Mires share the role) in a pre-title montage of home movie clips that fill in some essential backstory. There’s a birthday celebration where his mother Sandra (Jamie Lee Curtis) presents him with a big birthday cake while his Stetson-sporting Japanese father Masado Banzai (James Saito) knots a lasso. Then there’s the test of his father’s invention known as the oscillation overthruster, developed with his friend and colleague Professor Hikita (Robert Ito), that goes fatally wrong due to sabotage by arch-villain, Hanoi Xan.

Flash forward 30 years and the Banzai Institute is replicating the experiment, but the adult Buckaroo (Peter Weller) is late for the test because he’s been called in to help brain surgeon Sidney Zwibel (Jeff Goldblum) finish a particularly tricky operation. We don’t get a good look at either actor as they are fully suited and masked. When Buckaroo Banzai arrives for what seems to be an attempt to break the land speed record, his identity is hidden by a visored helmet as he climbs aboard a prototype jet car based on a Ford F-350 truck, fitted with twin rocket thrusters. He then installs his new-improved version of the oscillation overthruster that he and Professor Hikita have finally perfected.

In the first few minutes, we’re treated to some cool trans-dimensional car action, setting the bar ahead of Back to the Future, as the speeding vehicle veers off-track and straight towards an outcrop of rock. Disaster seems inevitable until the overthruster is activated and the car disappears into the mountain to emerge, still in one piece, on the other side.

Only after Buckaroo tumbles from the decelerating car and removes his helmet do we get a good look at his face. It’s a confident reveal worthy of an iconic superhero or superstar, but at the time the character was new to us, and this was only Peter Weller’s second lead role, after the previous year’s Of Unknown Origin (1983). Here, he’s a good choice for the polymath hero because he’s lean and athletic but can also look like a boffin when wearing a suit and red-framed spectacles.

While passing through the mountain via the 8th dimension, Buckaroo witnessed a Stargate-style sequence of psychedelic colours and shapes, and a couple of humanoid forms also bounced off his windscreen. We’ll later learn that these are alien Red Lectroid war criminals from Planet 10 who were banished into the dimensional prison. News that Buckaroo managed to penetrate the interdimensional void and return unscathed reaches Dr Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow), prompting his escape from the secure hospital for the insane where he is an inmate. Right from the start, Lithgow is at his full-on, scenery-devouring best in the most unhinged performance of his career as a madman inhabited by two minds in conflict.

Turns out that, back in the 1930s, Lizardo was the brilliant physicist who, along with the young Professor Hikita, had invented the first crude version of an oscillation overthruster. During a botched test run, he managed to partially embed himself in solid matter, creating a connection to the eighth dimension through which the evil Lectroid warlord, John Whorfin, escaped by taking possession of Lizardo as his vessel. Now, the existence of a fully functioning overthruster offers a way for him to reunite with his Red Lectroid minions and return to conquer Planet 10.

However, as if things weren’t complicated enough, a Black Lectroid spaceship appears in Earth orbit and dispatches their envoy John Parker (Carl Lumbly) to assist Buckaroo Banzai and his comrades in stopping Lord John Whorfin. He also delivers a holographic message from their leader, John Emdall (Rosalind Cash) that should they fail, a nuclear bomb will be detonated over Russian territory, thus triggering Armageddon and destroying Whorfin and his Red Lectroid army. Unfortunately, this would also wipe out the human race.

With the Lectroid aliens designating themselves by colour, it’s not hard to detect a subtext tackling racist tensions in the US. The Black Lectroids, all played by Black actors, were the victims of a race war but managed to win through and defeat their fascist oppressors who remain a constant threat to their peace. The imagery has plenty of mid-20th-century nostalgia, and the flashback vignettes explicitly take us back to the 1950s when ‘the reds under the bed’ paranoia was rife—‘reds’ being the perceived communist threat from Russia and China. The desert test site, with its sand-bagged bunkers, conjures imagery of the nuclear tests that took place in the nearby Nevada Proving Grounds, which connects with the threat of all-out nuclear war, said to be at its height around 1984, while the film was in production.

So, we have a great MacGuffin in the overthruster and a race against time with the countdown to a nuclear holocaust—two essential elements for any James Bond-style action thriller, which is what MGM studio executive David Begelman thought he had greenlighted. Later, he would become so exasperated with how the production was taking shape that he threatened to pull the plug on it several times, once over an argument with director W.D Richter about Buckaroo Banzai wearing those red-framed spectacles, which he deemed unsuitable for a hero. As if that was the most unconventional thing about the movie!

This was Richter’s directorial debut after penning a few notable scripts including Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and John Badham’s Dracula (1979). For him, Buckaroo Banzai was already a labour of love that had been in the making for nearly a decade since he discussed initial ideas with writer Earl Mac Rauch, a fellow graduate from the ‘Ivy League’ Dartmouth College. By 1976, after numerous aborted scripts, too many ideas, and an unwieldy array of characters, they finally had a treatment with the working title, Find the Jetcar, Said the President, a Buckaroo Banzai Thriller. It seems no one was prepared to risk any budget on such a strange idea coming from a first-time scriptwriter and another scriptwriter wanting to direct. It failed to garner any interest, and the project was shelved.

After Earl Mac Rauch wrote his first produced script, for Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), he and Richter picked up where they left off and continued touting their Buckaroo Banzai scripts until finally connecting with producer Neil Canton, who introduced the duo to colleagues at MGM. One thing led to another, and by 1980, a tentative deal was on the table with David Begelman at MGM. Then the endless problems that were to plague the production began.

Development of the script was arrested by the 1981 Writers Guild strike, and by the time Earl Mac Rauch had completed the screenplay, things at MGM were in turmoil as it was in the process of absorbing United Artists. David Begelman left to form his own independent company, Sherwood Productions, and as there was still a buy-out option on the Buckaroo Banzai script, he took that with him to be his new company’s debut. In Buckaroo, he saw a rival for Indiana Jones and dreamt of delivering a blockbuster in the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). What Earl Mac Rauch had in mind was something more like the frenetic Hong Kong kung fu films of the 1970s fused with the dystopian cyberpunk sensibilities of Mad Max (1979) and the fever-dream science fiction of William Burroughs.

This would be Neil Canton’s first film in the role of producer, and he seemed sympathetic to what Richter and Rauch were trying to do. As would be expected with a newbie producer, writer, and director working with a fledgling production company, there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm during the shoot but also much chaos.

Production began with the great Jordan Cronenweth as director of photography, fresh from Blade Runner (1982). A few scenes that he shot survive in the final cut, including the nightclub sequence when Buckaroo interrupts the Hong Kong Cavaliers’ rocking set to address a lone woman in the audience who’s crying into her bourbon. She turns out to be Penny Priddy, identical twin sister to Peggy Priddy—the love of Buckaroo’s life who was murdered by arch-villain Hanoi Xan. She produces a pistol and attempts suicide during Buckaroo’s downbeat ballad, but her arm is jolted, sending the shot wild and prompting the Cavaliers to draw their own weaponry on stage. That’s when we realise that these guys are neither your usual rock-and-roll band nor the science geeks we may have presumed.

Cronenweth was replaced by Fred J. Koenekamp, also a veteran cinematographer but with a very different aesthetic and plenty of experience working on classic TV series such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and Kung Fu (1972–73). In interviews, W.D Richter has said that he found the widescreen format problematic as he was directing with smaller screen home entertainment in mind, so had to be aware of what would be cropped out of each shot while making full use of the ingenious set dressing by Linda DeScenna, who had also worked on Blade Runner.

Perhaps the most notable of Koenekamp’s credits would be Michael Anderson’s Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975)—Buckaroo’s closest predecessor being exactly what Buckaroo Banzai pretends to be. The character Clark ‘Doc’ Savage Jr. is cited as templating the concept of the comic book superhero, first appearing in 1933 as the star of his own Doc Savage Magazine—carrying heavily illustrated ‘boys’ own’ style adventure stories. Just like Dr Buckaroo Banzai, Doc Savage is a man of action polymath, surgeon, scientist, inventor, martial arts master, and musician. He’s also accompanied by a team of quirky colleagues with a mix of down-to-earth combat skills and specialist knowledge on a wide range of subjects.

The original adventure magazine ran for 181 issues before the character transitioned into a series of paperback reprints of the adventures from the mid-1960s to the 1990s. In the 1970s he starred in a series of Marvel comics. So, by the time the movie came along, the characters already had a rich history, just like Buckaroo and his Hong Kong Cavaliers allude to within the fictional reality of the movie.

One aspect of Buckaroo Banzai’s production that seemed trouble-free was the casting and the resulting performances. By all accounts, the entire cast had a blast and still talk about it as one of the most fun times of their careers. Much of the character development was organic and came from the actors while filming. W.D Richter has said he was often so surprised by what they did with the material that he forgot to direct them—a case in point being John Lithgow’s memorable speech channelling Benito Mussolini. The director decided to capitalise on the energy and rapport among the cast by throwing in unscripted elements to keep them on their toes and encourage improvisation. The sense of fun and immediacy remains evident on the screen, adding to the finished film’s considerable charm.

The only major criticism I have for one of my favourite films is that Ellen Barkin is underused as the female lead. Don’t get me wrong, she’s pulling out all the stops and treating the ludicrous scenario with as much seriousness as anyone. The character demonstrates intelligence by quickly grasping the pseudo-scientific jargon about the eighth dimension, but all she does is get repeatedly captured and rescued as an excuse to get Buckaroo into the situations required to move the narrative along.

The visual effects also draw some criticism, but I have no problem with them. They’re certainly dated, but I love the nostalgia of unconvincing model effects and would be dismayed should they ever be ‘improved’ by VFX tampering. Besides, the spacecraft design and interiors are refreshingly different from the sleek sci-fi norms of the day. Their organic forms seem more grown than engineered, reminiscent of Star Trek’s “The Doomsday Machine” (1967) or the Axon technology of Doctor Who’s “The Claws of Axos” (1971).

Nowadays, online reviews are either one or five stars, with no signs of ambivalence. Most of the detractors accuse the movie of being overly convoluted and self-indulgent. Which it is, but in the best possible way! Admittedly, it takes several viewings to catch all the salient clues and grasp what’s going on. There are some loose ends, such as the references to unseen arch-villain Hanoi Xan who seems to be systematically murdering Buckaroo’s friends and family. But we know those were already foreshadowing events planned for the sequels…

One sure thing is David Begelman wasn’t happy with the result. He had no idea how to market it and thought the ending was either too cynical or not satirical enough. His fix was to find the funds to budget the shooting of an additional scene. Months after the wrap, all the main cast were recalled for a musical march along the Los Angeles storm drains that has since become iconic, meriting an overt reference from Wes Anderson as the end credits of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).

Neil Canton seemed happier about things and his next film as a producer would be Back to the Future, which also features an iconic motor vehicle, stars Christopher Lloyd, and has its own overthruster-like MacGuffin in the form of the flux capacitor.

W.D Richter would direct only one other film, Late for Dinner (1991), but he would co-write one of the other much-loved, crazy cult movies of the eighties, John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986) which would make for a great double-bill with Buckaroo Banzai.

Apart from contributing to a docudrama about James Belushi, Wired (1989), Earl Mac Rauch has concentrated on writing further adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in script and novel formats, some of these co-written with W.D Richter, and a few of them have been published. He has also contributed to the long-running fanzine, World Watch One, which was first published in 1986 and remains active.

The marketing for Buckaroo Banzai was minimal. Trailers were screened at Star Trek conventions and adverts were placed in Marvel comics. On initial release, it only managed to recoup half of its $12M or so budget. But that was only the beginning of a slow and sure rise towards the unassailable, nostalgia-bolstered cult esteem it enjoys today. I saw it back in the eighties and have bonded with friends over the movie so, I feel a deep affection for it. But I realise I may well be biased. If you haven’t seen The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, then I urge you to seek it out.

You’ll love it. (Or you’ll hate it.)

USA | 1984 | 103 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: W.D Richter.
writer: Earl Mac Rauch.
starring: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Lewis Smith, Clancy Brown, Robert Ito & Carl Lumbly.