#BACKAROO BONZI LICENSE#
Plus, the film has great music – the first tune belted out by Banzai's band is "Rocket 88", often considered to be the very first rock-and-roll song (1951 Buckaroo's jet car in the film has "Rokit88" for a license plate), which is followed (after Ellen Barkin's character in the club audience tries to shoot herself) by one of the all-time great love-lost ballads, "Since I don't have you" (The Skyliners, 1958).
Add in John Lithgow as the leader of the Red Lectroids, who gives a wonderfully manic performance as an alien with a Mussolini complex, Ellen Barkin as the femme fatale, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Robert Ito, Jonathan Banks, and a host of little-known but gifted actors who play Banzai sidekicks (and members of Buckaroo’s band, The Hong Kong Cavaliers), and you have a totally charming cast ensemble. The aliens (called Red Lectroids) are right now (1984) preparing to return to their planet, as their leader breaks out of the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane, and the plot is off and running.īuckaroo Banzai’s jet car, with which he drove through a mountain, with the help of his oscillation overthruster ()Īnother attraction of the film is the cast, starting with Peter Weller in by far his best film role as Buckaroo Banzai – physicist, brain surgeon, rock band leader, and interpenetrator of matter with his jet car ( second image) and his “oscillation overthruster”, the device that allows him to drive through a mountain ( third image). Instead, it described a true alien encounter that was later proclaimed a hoax for security reasons. The film also explores the possibility that the famous 1938 Halloween broadcast by Orson Wells witnessing a Martian invasion at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, was not a hoax after all. That possibility in turn gives rise to the suggestion that, at the moment of intersection, other dimensions with alien occupants might be encountered. Part of the film’s attraction lies in the scientific premise (yes, it actually has one, unlike most SF movies) that if matter is mostly empty space, then two solid objects ought to be able to pass through one another.
This is one of my favorite SF films, although I would appear to be very much in the minority here, for reasons unfathomable. 15, 1984, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension premiered on screens across the country, making today the 35th anniversary of the release of that science fiction classic.
0 kommentar(er)
