On this year’s blindspot movies list I had added two eighties movies, which both had to do something with aliens. I decided to check out The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension first. There is something about movies from the eighties which I really appreciate which isn’t only because it is the era in which I grew up. The movies from that time have a certain feel and CGI wasn’t a big thing yet, which would mean a lot more creativity to realize some ideas. Because of that some things feel a lot more real and actually have weight as things were physical. This is also the case here.
The story this movie tells is bizarre as the title character, who is (to quote Wikipedia) “a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and rock musician”. He has “to save the world by defeating a band of inter-dimensional aliens called Red Lectroids from Planet 10”. So basically he is the eighties superhero movie version of an Iron Man/Doctor Strange character who also happens to play music. The weird thing about the movie though is that it sets up the character that has a whole backstory and I was suprised to read that this movie wasn’t based off some (comic) book. He has a whole team of strange characters surrounding him, The Hong Kong Cavaliers, and together they are efficient at dealing with various situations.
It’s a movie with a lot of well-known actors in it, including Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum and Christopher Lloyd (funny detail I saw was that a part of an experimental vehicle that Buckaroo uses looks a lot like the flux capacitor in the Back to the Future movies). It is a movie which was enjoyable to watch, although more for the strangeness of all of it, than for an involving story. The strange characters, like the scene chewing acting by Lithgow or Goldblum doing his thing, weird story make sure it is never boring. So if you are up for something a little bit different, give this one a chance.
[score7]