Buckaroo Banzai: The Cult Sci-Fi Comedy Nobody Can Explain

Every attempt to summarise The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension makes the person doing it sound unwell, which is the film’s reputation and also its method. Here is the attempt anyway.

Buckaroo Banzai is a neurosurgeon, a particle physicist, a test pilot and a rock star. He is played by Peter Weller with the calm of a man who finds all four jobs equally routine. His band is his research team and is called the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Driving a jet car through solid rock, he proves the existence of the Eighth Dimension and returns with something stuck to the vehicle. This wakes Dr Emilio Lizardo, a physicist who has been in an asylum since 1938, when a similar experiment left him possessed by Lord John Whorfin, leader of the Red Lectroids of Planet 10. The Red Lectroids have been on Earth since 1938, when they arrived during an invasion that Orson Welles was compelled to pass off as a radio hoax. They operate a defence contractor in New Jersey called Yoyodyne. They are all called John.

W.D. Richter directed it in 1984 from a script by Earl Mac Rauch. Fox released it. It failed comprehensively, then spent a decade on cable and video acquiring the audience it should have had, which is where I found it, well after the fact, on a tape recorded off television with the first two minutes missing. I want to argue that missing the first two minutes made no difference whatsoever, and that this is the most interesting thing about the film.

Starting late on purpose

The design decision that governs everything is this: Buckaroo Banzai behaves like the eighth entry in a franchise that does not exist.

The film opens with the characters mid-career and the world mid-history. Nobody explains who the Hong Kong Cavaliers are, why a surgeon has a band, what the Banzai Institute is, or how Buckaroo acquired a jet car. Rawhide, Perfect Tommy and Reno are introduced the way a long-running series introduces its regulars — which is to say, they are not introduced. New Jersey, played by Jeff Goldblum in a full cowboy outfit that the film never once addresses, joins the team in the first act and the joke is that the audience is the only party who finds any of this remarkable.

Richter and Rauch have built the experience of walking into a cinema forty minutes late, and then made that the pleasure rather than the problem. The reason it works is that the film is internally consistent while being externally baffling. Every unexplained thing behaves lawfully. Yoyodyne turns up early as a name on a building and pays off later. The watermelon in the laboratory, which a character asks about and is told he will find out about later, is never explained — and the film’s refusal is a promise, because in a world with seven previous instalments, someone would know.

This is much harder to execute than it looks. Withholding exposition usually reads as a writer who has lost control. Buckaroo Banzai reads as a writer with an enormous amount of control who has decided that the backstory exists, is coherent, and is none of your business. The end credits promise a sequel — Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League — which was never made, and forty years on that unfulfilled title is doing exactly what the film’s unexplained watermelon does.

The real ancestor

People file this under Flash Gordon or under post-Star Wars pulp revival, and the 1980 Flash Gordon is a genuine sibling in tone. It is the wrong parent.

The parent is Doc Savage, and the resemblance is close enough to be a blueprint. Doc Savage — the Man of Bronze — ran in American pulp magazines from 1933, and Lester Dent’s hero was a surgeon, a scientist, an inventor, an adventurer and a physical prodigy, operating from a headquarters, backed by a fixed team of specialist companions each with a defined skill and a nickname, funded by an institute, opposed by recurring criminal organisations, and characterised chiefly by unflappability. Read that sentence again with Buckaroo’s name in it. It survives unedited.

The move Richter and Rauch make is to take the pulp polymath entirely seriously and place him in 1984. Doc Savage’s competence was played dead straight in the 1930s; the pulps meant it. Buckaroo Banzai’s competence is played with exactly that straight face, and the comedy arrives from the friction between an unironic pulp hero and a world of press conferences, network television and defence procurement. Weller’s performance is the load-bearing element, and it is a serious piece of work — he plays a man who is never surprised, in a film where everything is surprising, and he never breaks.

The deep-cut recommendation is the 1975 Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, produced by George Pal, which attempted the same revival and got the tone catastrophically wrong by winking at the material. It is a useful failure. It demonstrates that the only way into the pulp hero is to believe him, and let the modern world do the comedy. Richter understood that. Pal’s team did not.

The joke about who owns the future

There is a satire running underneath the pulp that tends to get lost in the noise about how weird the film is.

The Red Lectroids’ cover on Earth is Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, a defence contractor in New Jersey — and the name is lifted from Thomas Pynchon, who used Yoyodyne as his own recurring aerospace conglomerate. Richter and Rauch took it deliberately, and the borrowing tells you what they were aiming at. Pynchon’s Yoyodyne is the faceless firm at the centre of an American conspiracy that may or may not exist. Buckaroo Banzai simply confirms it: the defence contractor is staffed entirely by aliens, they have been embedded since 1938, the government has no idea, and the fact that they are all named John has never triggered a single background check.

The Welles gag works the same way. Reframing the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast as a genuine landing covered up by an official hoax is funny for a beat, and then it keeps paying out, because it means the most famous mass panic in American media history was the one time the public was right. The film’s view of institutions is consistent throughout: the press conference is theatre, the chain of command is helpless and reachable only through a screen, and the one organisation in the country that can actually respond to an alien incursion is a rock band with a laboratory. The state subcontracts the crisis to a celebrity, because the celebrity is the only one who has read the file.

Why it works: Lithgow

The film’s other engine is John Lithgow, giving one of the great big performances of the decade as Lizardo and Whorfin, and it repays close attention because it is technically bizarre.

Lithgow is playing an Italian physicist possessed by an alien warlord, and he makes the choice — the correct, insane choice — to perform the possession as a bad accent fighting itself. Whorfin speaks through Lizardo’s Italian, and the accent slips and surges depending on which personality has the wheel, so you can track the internal struggle purely through vowels. It is a comic performance built on a genuinely rigorous idea, and Lithgow commits at a volume that should destroy the film and instead anchors it.

He is also doing the load-bearing work on tone. Weller plays it cool and Lithgow plays it enormous, and the gap between them is where the film’s register lives. Take either performance out and the whole thing collapses into either a dry indulgence or a cartoon.

Christopher Lloyd, meanwhile, is playing a Lectroid called John Bigbooté who becomes visibly furious every time someone mispronounces it. The joke runs the entire film and never gets a punchline. That is the picture in miniature.

The case against

It is genuinely, structurally alienating, and the people who bounce off it are not being obtuse. A film that withholds its premise as a bit is asking the audience for trust it has not earned yet, and roughly half of any given room will decide, twenty minutes in, that the film is being clever at their expense. That impression is wrong. It is also entirely reasonable.

The plot mechanics in the last act are the real weakness. Once the film has to resolve — with an alien threat, a countdown and a rescue — it needs the conventional machinery it has spent an hour refusing to install, and the third act is noticeably more ordinary than what precedes it. Ellen Barkin’s Penny Priddy suffers most; she is a terrific presence given a function rather than a part, and the film keeps mislaying her.

And the budget shows exactly where you would expect. Fox did not spend, and the Lectroid effects and the dimensional sequences are doing a lot of work with very little.

The verdict

It is the most confident cult film of the 1980s and the confidence is what people mistake for chaos. Every strange thing in it is deliberate, load-bearing and consistent, which is why it rewards the fourth viewing more than the first, and why it has held an audience for forty years on a promise it never kept. It belongs on any short list of the films that found their audience after midnight rather than at the box office.

Watch it as a double bill with Repo Man, released the same year, which is the same joke told from the bottom of society instead of the top: aliens, a car, a conspiracy nobody will explain, and a completely straight face. Between them they are 1984 in American genre cinema. Buckaroo Banzai is easy to find on disc and streams reliably.

Spoilers below

Whorfin’s plan is to repair the Yoyodyne craft, cross the Eighth Dimension and retake Planet 10, and the Black Lectroids — the faction he was exiled by — have made it clear that if he leaves Earth, they will trigger a nuclear exchange between the superpowers to stop him, framed so that neither side knows what happened. Buckaroo therefore has an afternoon to prevent a war he cannot tell anyone about.

He wins, which was never in doubt, and the film knows it was never in doubt, and that is the point of a pulp hero. Doc Savage always won too. The pleasure was watching an unflappable man be unflappable in escalating circumstances, and Weller delivers the final confrontation with the mild competence of a man defusing a domestic argument.

Then the film does the thing that made it permanent. It ends and the credits roll and the Hong Kong Cavaliers walk — down a concrete aqueduct, in formation, to that swaggering theme, each of them individually pleased with themselves, going nowhere in particular for several minutes. No plot. No resolution. A band walking.

That sequence is the entire film’s argument stated without dialogue. These people exist beyond the borders of the story you were shown. They had adventures before this one and they are walking towards the next, and the sequel card promises it, and it never came. Forty years of an audience wanting a film that does not exist, generated by a walk and a title card. Nobody has done it better since.