One of the most esteemed scenes in American cinema, yes?
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) remains a conundrum for anyone who thinks stories are serious endeavours, and those that are not well done should be considered a failure. This one is full of silliness: a scientist who’s a rock star who meets his late wife’s unknown twin sister at a concert? The same scientist doesn’t follow protocol, but accedes an impulse to drive a superfast car into a mountain of waste, there encountering other-dimensional creatures who bounce of the car’s windscreen?
Aliens from that dimension, desperately searching for a way home, are after the same scientist’s device which powered the car, which itself is a refinement of another device used to open the dimension, which allowed an alien to take over the body of another foolhardy scientist? What, don’t they teach these scientists impulse control?
All the aliens are named John, for goodness’ sake!
And then there’s the climactic battle, wherein we discover just where the hell some of the Star Wars space action sequences came from, which I find obscurely disturbing.
And despite all that, we keep coming back to see it again and again. Cult Classic is scrawled across the film tin as if written by a drunken madman. Maybe it’s a way station for some stars, and an origin for others, because names just roll off the tongue: Clancy Brown, Christopher Lloyd, John Lithgow, Peter Weller, Emily Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Robert Ito, Yakov Smirnoff, just to name a few. It’s a cast who knows how to act and pulled it off without cracking a smile.
Recommend it? Of course. It’s a necessity of the American cultural scene. If you haven’t seen it, you won’t really understand American culture.
Now will you?
