Word: banzaied
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...scientist in his Late Show lab. And its Japanese-American hero? He is only the avatar of Han Solo, A. J. Foyt, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Christiaan Barnard, Bruce Lee and Bruce Springsteen. A state-of-the-art spaceship flying at the speed of light without narrative coordinates, Buckaroo Banzai is the very oddest good movie in many a full moon...
...feeble attempt must be made to synopsize the film's hallucinogenic plot. In 1938 Orson Welles scared his radio fans with a show about aliens landing in Grovers Mill, N.J. Buckaroo Banzai proposes that the invasion was for real. The aliens were not Martians but "Lectroids" from the distant Planet 10, who took on human form while searching for the technology needed to destroy the earth and launch them back to do intergalactic evil. Now the technology, an Oscillation Overthruster, is just beyond their grasp: in the hands of our hero, who discovered it while traveling through solid rock...
...ferocious battle of wits ensues. On one side: Buckaroo (Peter Weller) and the members of Team Banzai. On the other: Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow), once a brilliant physicist, now the vilest, battiest extraterrestrial in all the genre. Meanwhile, the benevolent rulers of Planet 10 hover above New Jersey in a craft that looks like the Mollusk from Outer Space, dispensing wisdom and even more confusion. Where will it lead? Most likely to nuclear annihilation. Already the President of the U.S. is opening a dread, eyes-only packet that reads DECLARATION OF WAR: THE SHORT FORM...
...also a passel of sharp performances. The presence of such actors as Christopher Lloyd (Zenned-out on an inner voice that must sound like Daffy Duck's), Ellen Barkin (with her bruised features and street-angel smile) and Jeff Goldblum (heartthrob of the Mensa sorority) clues Buckaroo Banzai as very chic scifi. Lithgow, the movies' Mr. Versatile (transsexual jock in The World According to Garp, bumbling lover in Terms of Endearment, incendiary preacher in Footloose), here does a manic turn as Dr. Lizardo; it is as if old mad Ezra Pound were played by Klaus Kinski. And Weller...
...viewers could catch the first time around and still be an alltime blockbuster. MTV serves up a Dalicatessen of surreal images, and everybody comes back for seconds. Gremlins goes through more drastic mood changes than Sybil; it has sold more than $100 million worth of tickets this summer. Buckaroo Banzai, then, is simply extending the trend of data overload. Still, its creators, Earl Mac Rauch (New York, New York) and W.D. Richter (who wrote Slither and Brubaker), propel their film with such pace and farfetched style that anyone without Ph.D.s in astrophysics and pop culture is likely to get lost...