directed by Angus MacLane
written by Angus MacLane, Matthew Aldrich and Jason Headey
When Toy Story 4, which ended with Woody leaving his crew of toys, including Buzz Lightyear, to join up with his love interest Bopeep and HER crew of toys, made over $1 billion worldwide back in 2019, Disney took it to mean that there was plenty of interest left in the brand. They then decided that the best way to follow this story up was...with the origin story of Buzz Lightyear. Not the toy, mind you, but the fictional character within the Toy Story universe on whom the toy was based.
The result is a movie that could have been a lot worse, but which could have been better, as well.
Lightyear is the story of, well, Buzz Lightyear (played here by Captain America himself, Chris Evans, making his Pixar debut) a Space Ranger of Star Command who, together with his commanding officer and best friend Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) is accompanying a team of scientists as they explore possible the galaxy. While exploring the surface of the planet T'Kani Prime, they are attacked by hostile wildlife and have to flee in a hurry. Unfortunately, this results in severe damage to their ship, and the entire mission is marooned on an alien planet, without a functioning hyper-drive to get them home. Buzz then takes it on himself to run the test flights for new hyperdrive fuels, only to discover that each unsuccessful flight, which lasts only minutes for him, results in a lapse of four years upon his return. He perseveres, however, going into space again and again and losing time in four year clumps, even as his marooned colleagues, living behind a force field, have made a life for themselves on this new planet, including Alisha, who starts her own family. Meanwhile, the closest thing Buzz has to a family is a robotic cat, Sox (Ben Sohn) that Alisha gives him. After one trip, Buzz is shocked to find that more time has passed than even he could have imagined, and that the T'Kani Prime is now facing a threat the likes of which he has never seen before: the evil Zurg.
To be clear, the Toy Story movies were never straight-up adventures aimed at kids. The bright colors were incidental to the existential crises that the film's characters, led in all three films by Woody, felt. I've often said to my kids that Tom Hanks' greatest acting performance is actually as Woody considering he makes a near-homicidal maniac to be one of the most endearing characters in the history of animation. Those movies were all about the characters' foibles, including Buzz's delusions of grandeur in the first film.
This movie is, to be clear, is not about any of that, and I honestly think it's unfair that a lot of people were measuring it by that metric. One thing this film gets right, even as it tries to distinguish Buzz from his toy counterpart, is to make Buzz, like all of Pixar's best leads, a flawed character. His singlemindedness and determination to finish his mission at the cost of all else is not extolled as a virtue but rather as a flaw that causes him to basically miss out on much of his life, and this is the lesson he learns over the course of the film. There are plenty of callbacks to his Toy Story incarnation, with lines lifted directly from the earlier film, but it's clear this movie is meant to be its own thing.
I liked how this film eschewed the pastel colors of the Toy Story movies (and most other Pixar movies, for that matter, with the obvious exception of WALL-E) in favor of a darker, murkier color palette to reflect the grittier aspect of the narrative. There's a pretty obvious visual nod to Star Wars in at least one scene (and probably many others that I missed) but overall, the goal is to make this universe feel more lived-in, and it works. And yes, whatever the Tim Allen fanboys may say, I liked Chris Evans' performance as the "real-life" Buzz Lightyear. He was properly engaging as a character.
A gripe I had with the movie was a bit of a dissonance between the highly atmospheric, action- adventure approach and the goofy, lovable supporting characters that the film inevitably introduces later on, like the idiot played by Taika Waititi or the ex-con. There are space bugs that, in a movie rated PG-13 or higher could definitely have the potential to kill one or more supporting characters, but this movie is only PG, so do the math. All of the main antagonists are robots, so there's no worry about the gratuitous henchman deaths that earned The Incredibles Pixar's first-ever PG rating. That said, despite the considerably lower body count of organic lifeforms, this movie still gets a PG rating for "action and peril" despite the fact that, at no point did I ever really feel like the characters were in actual peril. You know in Coco there was this ever-present threat that Miguel might not make it back to the land of the living, which grew greater and greater as the film progressed? This film, despite its villain, doesn't have that sense of urgency.
It's a handsome film, to be sure, but far from Pixar's best work. It's actually more reminiscent of a family-friendly version of an episode of Love, Death and Robots, the animated anthology series on Netflix.
A lot has been said about a certain aspect of one of the supporting characters which has caused a furor among conservatives all around the world. I have no opinion on that; I will only say that Disney/Pixar made a judgment call and ultimately paid the price for it in terms of global box-office.
7/10
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