There’s enough backstory here to provide the plot for several lesser films. It’s always a step ahead of the audience, with another trick up its sleeve, or some dangling plot thread that promises more. Unlike the incomprehensibility of movies like John Boorman’s Zardoz, or even 2001: A Space Odyssey, which tend to alienates audiences, the name of the game in Banzai is fun, particularly if you’re into comics, sci-fi, and rock n’ roll (read: ardent readers of this website). The real delight of Buckaroo Banzai is its incomprehensibility. With Banzai, this tangled web of half-baked plot threads is its raison d’être. For some films, an impenetrable plot such as this is a death sentence. This mash-up of themes and ideas (transdimensional aliens, doppelganger girlfriends, Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds, Cold War paranoia, racial relations, satire) is hurled against the wall with such force that most of the ideas splatter together in a mess that would do Jackson Pollock proud. Oh, and there are aliens here, too – but instead of coming from outer space, warring factions of a species known as Lectroids (from Planet 10) have broken through a dimensional gap that Buckaroo has accessed. Ostensibly, it chronicles the continuing adventures of celebrity neurosurgeon, rock star, experimental race car driver, science enthusiast Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) and his best buds, many of whom share in Banzai’s glut of post-doctoral papers, and who also moonlight as his backing band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. To describe the plot is an exercise in exposition.
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