The Adventures of Pluto Nash

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Notoriously unsuccessful Eddie Murphy vehicle that attempted to combine a Rat Pack-esque plot with sci-fi. Murphy plays Pluto Nash, owner of a successful nightclub on the moon, when goons from aspiring entrepreneur Rex Crater come to buy the club. When Pluto refuses he's forced to go on the run to survive and unravel the truth of who Rex Crater is and what he's planning for the moon.

Cost an insane amount of money to make, made none of it back.

Tropes used in The Adventures of Pluto Nash include:
  • Affably Evil: Rex Crater, being a clone of Pluto, is a very nice guy.
  • Artificial Gravity
  • Ax Crazy: Bruno.
  • Berserk Button: Pluto goes berserk on a Mook for blowing up his club, as the bar stools were made of real wood, which apparently (and quite logically) costs a small fortune to get hold of on the moon. Rex later has a similar reaction when Pluto bangs up his wooden model props.
  • Box Office Bomb: Budget plus marketing costs? A cool 120 mil, which is roughly what a studio back then would sink in to a film whenever they're expecting a blockbuster. But how much did this movie rake in at the box office? 7.1 million. To be exact, they lost 112,896,027 dollars on this stinker, which amounts to a 94.08% loss. Adjusted for inflation, it's net loss is the third largest in film history. As far as box office bombs go, this one is nuclear. Kaboom.
  • Breast Expansion: Played for Laughs in one scene.
  • Car Chase
  • Chekhov's Gun: A particularly painful example as it's critical to the entire plot of the film, in the introductory Pluto makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to having his kidney taken out in prison. The DNA from it was used to clone him and make Rex Crater.
  • Domed Hometown: Well, it is set on the moon.
  • Heroic Build/Amazonian Beauty: While posing as a couple to get info, Pluto and Dina go to see a body alteration specialist, who shows them different projections of what their bodies could look like. One of these is the pair as a male and female bodybuilder. Pluto, cracking a joke about Dina's bust needing work, then asks the specialist to make some adjustments, resulting in Dina being given a tune-up in the front and back.
  • Human Shield/Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: Subverted in one of the better scenes:

Pluto: "Alright, put the guns down! Unless you wanna try and shoot around your friend here!"
Mook: "Easier to shoot through him."
Pluto and his human shield: (variations on a theme of "Oh Crap!")

  • Large Ham: Bruno in particular, but most of the cast seem to be aware it was a pretty mediocre film and just have as much fun with the role as possible.
  • Raygun Gothic: The general art-style.
  • Ridiculously-Human Robots: Bruno and the French Maid robot, the slot-machine.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: The movie's plot has plenty of problems, there's a fair bit of Special Effects Failure, and it's pretty silly overall. But it still probably would have done much better if the soundtrack hadn't been so blatantly cartoonish. The heavy-handed, simplistic soundtrack is a major part of what makes it stylistically resemble the live-action Flintstones movie.
  • Spot the Imposter: The climax.
  • Uncle Tomfoolery: Subverted. Pluto is a rare example of a character who used to fit that trope pretty well, but grew out of it. He's also the Straight Man.
  • You Fail Astronomy Forever: The film is supposed to take place in the Moon, where gravity is 1/6 or Earth's one, yet they move and act as if they were on our planet's surface. Artificial gravity generators?
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