Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife. Doomed is your soul and damned is your life.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension — 1.5/5

I can't quite imagine people actually liking this movie so much as seeing something in it worth liking. I can see the appeal of it, for sure. It's stupid—but genuinely cool. That is a rare thing. Buckaroo and his gang have names, they have style. They react to drama like a breeze just flew through. They're an 80s music video as action heroes, a movie-sized version of "Take on Me." The movie most succeeds when it most realizes this. I actually don't think there's anything more interesting in the movie than the final credits sequence, where a bunch of cool people walk across a cool canvas while a cool song plays. They're heading from somewhere, to somewhere, and I want to know the story before and after that. At its best, it's an attempt at a pastiche movie, putting all the cool things in one place. But the movie enforces movie-sized linearity on what could have been the world's longest music video, building atop an increasingly uninteresting plot which gets in the way of growing any attachment to the Hong Kong Cavaliers. They're a rough sketch brought to life, but remain nothing more than rough sketches. They're a picture in a magazine. "I'd like to be them," without ever getting to know them. The images in this movie are so interesting, and the movie itself is so forgettable. I was forty minutes in before realizing I'd already seen it before.