Josh Reviews Lightyear

In the Pixar film Lightyear, Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear and his partner Alisha Hawthorne are assigned to shepherd a group of colonists to the planet that will serve as their new home.  But when their ship crash-lands on an unknown, hostile world, Buzz devotes himself to finding a way to get his people off the planet safely.

I was intrigued by the idea of this film.  I love science fiction, and I thought it was an interesting notion to take the comedic character of Buzz from the Toy Story films and use him as the hero of a sci-fi adventure story.  I was bummed to miss Lightyear in theatres but excited to catch up to it when it was added to Disney+ several months ago.  Unfortunately, I was bummed to discover that the film doesn’t quite work.  It’s beset by story problems that for me undermined the story being told, and prevented me from connecting to the characters in the way I usually do with a Pixar/Disney animated film.  Without that connection, the film wasn’t able to build to any sort of emotional climax for me; it just felt sort of flat.

The problems start right from the very beginning, in which a title card tells us:  “In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie.”  But that framing feels completely incorrect for the movie that follows.  First off, Lightyear doesn’t at all feel like a sci-fi film from 1995.  There’s nothing retro or of that era about this film.  Furthermore, I cannot possibly believe that this rather somber movie could have been young Andy’s favorite movie as a kid.  I don’t buy that at all.  I’m fascinated by the choice of the filmmakers behind Lightyear to give this version of Buzz feet of clay; he’s an incredibly flawed hero who makes bad choices for most of the movie.  That could have been an interesting story-telling choice, but it doesn’t make sense to me that this Buzz would be young Andy’s favorite character and beloved toy.  So constantly as I was watching the movie, my mind kept coming back to that opening title card, and questioning the movie that I was watching because it didn’t fit that set-up.  The movie would have been much stronger without that title card.  (That title card frankly feels like a late addition to the film, perhaps prompted by executive nervousness about explaining to the audience exactly how this Buzz Lightyear connects to the Buzz that kids/fans knew from Toy Story.  But it causes far more harm than good, in my opinion.)

Even putting that aside and judging the rest of the movie on its own, there were too many places where the story doesn’t make sense to me.  Beware SPOILERS in the next two paragraphs.  A key plot twist early in the film has to do with Buzz’s suffering the effects of time-dilation caused by faster-than-light travel.  But it doesn’t make any sense to me that Buzz, who is an astronaut in a space-program that clearly uses faster-than-light travel, would not be aware of time-dilation!!  Either the Space Rangers should have some technology that overcomes that time-dilation effect (as is the case in, say, Star Trek and Star Wars, where ships routinely zip around the galaxy using faster-than-light travel without the crews suffering the effects of time-dilation, in which time moves faster for the rest of the galaxy than it does for them), in which case none of these time-dilation problems should have been happening for Buzz… OR Buzz should have been prepared for this issue, because this is what always happens when the Space Rangers use their FTL drives.  Either way, this doesn’t feel like it should have been a shocking surprise for Buzz.

Second, the whole Zurg reveal fell flat for me.  I don’t think the film gets nearly enough mileage out of the future-Buzz twist.  It happens too late in the movie, so we don’t get enough Buzz-vs-Buzz drama for me.  Also, none of the Zurg stuff is actually explained!!  Why do all the robots call future Buzz Zurg??  (There’s a line where future Buzz says something like how the robots can’t pronounce his name correctly, but come on, that’s not an actual explanation.)  If you’re going to try to fool the audience by including Zurg (Buzz’s toy enemy from the Toy Story films), then you’ve got to play fair and actually explain why future Buzz is using this Zurg identity, which the film disappointingly never does.

There was a lot of online kerfuffle about this film’s recasting Tim Allen, who’d voiced Buzz in all the Toy Story films, with Chris Evans (Captain America from the MCU films).  I’m assuming the Pixar folks wanted to cash in on Mr. Evans’ popularity. Mr. Evans is great in the film; he makes a fine Buzz.  But there’s no reason in my mind why Tim Allen couldn’t have played this role.  He’d have been perfectly capable of playing a more straight, serious version of Buzz.  In the end, while I think Chris Evans is solid in the role, he’s not demonstrably better than Tim Allen, so I’d have preferred it had they stuck with Mr. Allen.  Feels like tie goes to the runner in this case.  (Also, because the film’s opening title card specifically ties this movie to the Toy Story universe, wouldn’t it make more sense for the Buzz toy to have sounded like Buzz in the movie??  This is another reason why I wonder if that opening title card was not originally a part of the film, and if this Buzz was not originally intended to have been so closely connected to the Toy Story’s Buzz.)

I love the character of Sox, Buzz’s robotic cat companion.  Sox is an incredible new character, wonderfully voiced by Peter Sohn.  I loved Sox!

The film also introduces a group of bumbling characters who become Buzz’s team in the second half of the film.  I enjoyed all of these characters, and they’re each brought to life by a terrific actor.  But I didn’t get to know any of these characters as deeply as I’d wanted.  This ties into what I’d written above, about how I didn’t connect to the characters in this film the way I usually do in Pixar and Disney films.  That’s so important to the story being able to work on an emotional level!  The problem here in Lightyear is that, in my opinion, it takes way, way too long for the film’s story to get going.  We don’t meet this team until we’re almost halfway through the film.  I think these characters needed more screen-time to get enough character development, so they’d feel like fully-realized characters who we know and love.  It’s a shame, because there was a lot of potential here.  Keke Palmer (Akeelah and the Bee) is wonderful as Izzy Hawthorne.  She brings such genuine emotion and vulnerability to the role.  Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok) is very funny as Mo Morrison, as is Dale Soules (Frieda on Orange is the New Black), whose deadpan delivery is perfect for the crusty, tough Darby Steel.

As is always the case for Pixar/Disney films, the rest of the cast is great as well.  Uzo Aduba (another Orange is the New Black veteran!) is great as Buzz’s best friend Alisha Hawthorne.  James Brolin is strong as future Buzz, though I wish he had more of a character to play.  Isaiah Whitlock Jr. (The Wire, Veep) is perfect as the no-nonsense Commander Burnside.  Bill Hader (The Skeleton Twins, Trainwreck, Barry) is fun in a small role as the rookie working with Buzz and Alisha in the film’s opening sequence.

As is also always the case for Pixar/Disney films, the film looks amazing.  The character animation is incredible; so smooth and life-like.  The character design is top-notch; each character has a very memorable and distinct look.  I particularly like the look of this “live-action” (but still animated!!) version of Buzz!!  They took the basic look of the Buzz toy from Toy Story and tweaked it just enough to allow him to look like a real human character, and they’ve designed a world around him that fits perfectly together.  I love all the tech in the film; the suits and the space-ships and the machines.  It’s all slightly bulky (just like Buzz) in a sort of retro-futuristic way.  It’s very tactile — this sci-fi future has buttons and levers (like classic Star Trek and Star Wars), and I love it for that.

The film got a lot of press because Buzz’s friend Alisha was established as gay, and it was banned in a number of markets across the world.  For all the hubbub, the gay content in the film consists of basically one second of screen-time, in which we see Alisha give her wife a brief peck.  That’s it.  On the one hand, it’s a delight to see LGBTQ+ characters in an animated Disney film.  On the other hand, that this only consists of one second of screen-time is disappointing.  If Disney/Pixar are going to start including gay characters in their movies, it’d be nice if that was actually a more substantive aspect of those characters.  (I feel like Disney has patted itself on the back for including LGBTQ+ characters like Alisha, and also LeFou from Beauty and the Beast and Valkyrie from the Thor films… but none of them have actually had more than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it on-screen reference to their homosexuality.)

I wish I’d liked Lightyear more!  I think it’s very cool that Pixar decided to make a straight sci-fi action/adventure.  I’d love to see more of this sort of thing.  (Unlikely, as the film did not perform well at the box office.)

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