The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension!

John Lithgow has said that describing this movie takes an hour. I’ve heard similar descriptions elsewhere, that it is complicated to the point of impenetrability. I couldn’t disagree more. It’s easy to explain: chosen one hero has to stop alien warlord. Is that overly simplistic? Sure. But it’s hard to explain more, because this movie doesn’t want to explain more, and that’s what keeps this from being actually good as opposed to interesting and weird. The script isn’t interested in world building or explaining its total lack of structure. Every five minutes, the movie is throwing new concepts at you, new characters, new tones, new everything, and the world is so crazy, it just sorta fits. But there is so little actually explained about the world, it all feels like an inside joke they don’t want to explain. I’ve never felt more like I needed to do a deep dive on a movie’s Wikipedia article before watching the movie like I do Buckeroo Banzai. The movie’s lore is so dense and and yet so ill-defined, and it’s not that it assumed you know. It just doesn’t care. And the editing makes the problem worse; there are sequences you can tell have been edited by way of run through a meat grinder, rendering scenes incoherent. And that’s a shame, because that barrier to entry keeps this from being anything more than a curiosity. The world it hints at sure is intriguing, and Peter Weller is fun in a weird way in the role; unattached, but not in a cool, hipster way. The cast of characters — played by the most random assortment of awesome actors, from Lithgow to Clancy Brown to Christopher Lloyd to Jeff Goldblum — is just as fun, and the hints of the world around them would be cool to see fleshed out. But this movie feels like the second or third in a series, not the first; if it was meant to be that, a satire on bloated sci-fi epics that presents itself as a middle chapter of a non-existent series like some weird Andy Kaufman gag, it’s a joke that wears itself out, because at some point, you’ll want the movie to actually be a movie. It’s too busy being … whatever the hell it is, which leaves it in the awkward spot of conceptually intriguing but hollow in execution.