You actually think you're THE Buzz Lightyear?
Lightyear, the 26th feature film produced by Pixar Animation studios and easily the worst one that has no talking cars in it, opens with two title cards relaying the following information: "In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie." It's almost subtly done; Toy Story is never mentioned by name, and while these cards are written in the same font as that movie's opening credits, it's sufficiently generic in its clean sans-serif way that I think you wouldn't notice if you weren't trying to notice. Even so, I wish it weren't there; the movie is bad enough as it is on its own without forcing us to think of the inestimably superior films Pixar used to make when it was still a great animation studio, back in the '90s and '00s. And I would much prefer to not wade into the muck of whether Lightyear resembles a film made in 1995 on any aesthetic or narrative level whatsoever. Long story short: it does not. And maybe it would have been fun if Pixar had decided to do a parody of '90s filmmaking with this project, though it then raises a question I cannot entirely answer, what is distinctively '90s-style filmmaking? Not this fucking superhero-esque nonsense, anyways.
The point being: Lightyear has, at its core, one of the absolute worst hooks I have ever heard for a movie in my entire life. "The movie from the Toy Story universe that inspired the toy who became a character whose whole thing was that he was kind of a generic idiot hero from a generic idiot sci-fi franchise". And the really frustrating thing is that Lightyear doesn't even get that part right: the film's "human" Buzz Lightyear (voiced without any texture, distinction, or personality by Chris Evans) says some of the same things that the "toy" Buzz also said, but the rip-off Star Wars backstory that's literally the only thing Toy Story gave us to explain who Buzz is or what a Space Range does is quite incompatible with the story we get here. Anyway, I am much happier dropping this line of thought; Lightyear is crummy enough without having to gag down the fact that it's just a sad, strange little piece of brand extension that represents maybe the single most craven "we own the universe, fuck you" gesture made by the greater Walt Disney Company since Ralph Breaks the Internet.
So, taking this a standalone project, a 2022 movie made for 2022 audiences: it's boring, badly-paced, and has a very sloppy script, emotionally neutered characters, and excruciatingly bad jokes; but it looks pretty nice. Pixar films always look nice, of course. They are the nicest-looking films modern American filmmaking is capable of producing, arguably; at the very least, they have the best lighting designers in contemporary CG animation, working with the fastest computers running the best rendering software. So it is maybe a cheat that Lightyear looks very gorgeous, as it creates an alien planet with a heavy, dusty sky and bold sunsets, spaceships full of sleek ice-blue lighting, and a good mix of fancifully realistic-ish character designs whose smooth simplicity helps tell us most of what we need to know about the characters' personalities from the moment we see them. But it's a cheat that works.
Still, "looks nice" isn't special, and Lightyear is in desperate need of something special to offset its rank garbage fire of a script. In brief: there's a sleeper ship that has left Earth looking for a planet to colonise, and Space Rangers Buzz Lightyear, Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), and Featheringhamstan the rookie (Bill Hader) are woken up to explore it. They quickly determine it's uninhabitable due to malevelont sentient vines, and in an attempt to escape the, Buzz crashes their ship - it is quite difficult to make out, based on how this is presented, whether he could have actually prevented this from happening, but it's meant to motivate his intense feelings of guilt, so let's assume not. The Space Rangers wake up the rest of the ship's crew to build a temporary settlement while the ship is repaired and its volatile fuel cells re-built. The fuel turns out to be the big problem: after a year, the ship is ready to go, but every time Buzz flies out to test the fuel cell, it ends up sputtering out before he's able to make sufficient speed to do... the thing, that part also isn't clear. But he does go fast enough for relativistic time dilation to kick in, so he keeps losing four years at a go, spending a couple of weeks or so of his own life running tests while Hawthorne dies of old age and the settlement grows from survival mode to become an actual thriving colony. By this point, the fuel is working, but when Buzz comes out of hyperspace to learn this, the planet has been overrun by hostile alien robots, and only three humans are out in the open, rather than trapped in the single city they've built. They're also three hapless rookie Space Ranger wannabes: Mo Morrison (Taika Waititi), Darby Steel (Dale Soules), and Hawthorne's granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer). And also Buzz has his robot therapy cat SOX (Peter Sohn, an animator and story artist at Pixar and elsewhere who ascended to the ranks of senior creative team member after finishing up directing the plagued 2015 release The Good Dinosaur).
In other words, Buzz has lost about a century, and every person he ever knew is dead, including his dear, dear friend Alisha, and Lightyear can squeeze exactly no emotional resonance out of this. A friend of mine made the peerless comparison to Up, back when Pixar still knew what they were doing, which has a legendarily emotional opening montage that's functionally identical to Lightyear's puffy, go-nowhere opening act, and breaks your heart as easily as cracking an egg. Even giving us considerably more time to know Alisha than Up gave us with Ellie, there's no comparing how much emptier this all feels. The opening act of Lightyear is, indeed, pretty shallow and empty across the board. There is, for one thing, how completely unnecessary it is: why, pray tell, other than that ostensibly affecting montage, do we need Buzz to make several different test flights? Just one flight, going wrong (or right in the wrong way) can get us 60 or 80 years in the future and absolutely everything else can proceed as normal. But instead, we get this protracted nothingness, in which the film writes I don't know how many checks it has no intention of cashing about Buzz's character arc (the inner conflict he resolves at the end is not the same as the inner conflict established up front, and there's never a point where that first conflict gets resolved), introduces questions and characters who get cleanly wiped off the board once Buzz arrives in the evil robot future, and just generally provides the most tedious, genuinely unwatchable material in Pixar's entire history. I would, gratefully, watch all of Cars 2 again rather than the opening 30 minutes of Lightyear.
It improves from there, as it almost has to - and it finds a way to get very, very bad again, once it supplies us with the most ill-considered twist villain reveal that Pixar or its sister studio, Walt Disney Animation, has ever crapped out in the assumption that the grand surprise of it will distract us from what an incoherent hash it makes of its characters - but even when everything is clicking in the middle, Lightyear can't do better than to rise up to the level of adequate mediocrity. Izzy, Mo, and Darby are pretty godawful characters, especially the latter two: they're the designated comic relief, and Lightyear has some of the most conspicuously bad comedy Pixar has ever punished us with. It feels like the machinery of jokes is in place, but the jokes themselves are not. There's this odd extended bit about how in The Future, there are sandwiches with meat on the outside and bread on the inside, and it surely feels like a gag, but it's such a weirdly morose one that I cannot fathom what's meant to be "funny". There's a long running gag about pens that ends up paying off in a sort of joke, but never feels like that prior to the payoff. Many of Soules's line deliveries have the cadence of a sassy grandma character in a shticky sitcom, but often without punchlines; many of Waititi's line deliveries feel laconic and distracted, even when there is a punchline.
SOX works; SOX is funny. SOX is basically "R2-D2, but as a cat", and while some bits go on past the point of going stale (saying "meow" instead of beeping is funny exactly once; it is used I think thrice), Sohn has the best line deliveries and SOX gets the best comic business. At one point, the robot accidentally starts emitting a red laser dot and begins chasing it, narrating its progress as it goes; this was the only time in the entire movie I made an audible laughter-like sound.
Anyway, remove SOX, and you have removed the only interesting and largely successful character in Lightyear. Not the only point of interest altogether: the production design mostly works, and there are some very good sci-fi action setpieces scattered across the film's latter two thirds. Still, the best the film can offer as "mildly diverting in an extremely generic way", and it is borderline impossible to care about the title character's travails. I mean, the whole point of Buzz Lightyear was that he was a pompous idiot compiled solely out of clichés; it makes sense that a story built around him would struggle to do anything whatsoever with his anti-presence other than throw a cute cat at him to distract us for a bit. Apparently it didn't make sense to the higher-ups at the studio, though, and therein lies the tragedy.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
The point being: Lightyear has, at its core, one of the absolute worst hooks I have ever heard for a movie in my entire life. "The movie from the Toy Story universe that inspired the toy who became a character whose whole thing was that he was kind of a generic idiot hero from a generic idiot sci-fi franchise". And the really frustrating thing is that Lightyear doesn't even get that part right: the film's "human" Buzz Lightyear (voiced without any texture, distinction, or personality by Chris Evans) says some of the same things that the "toy" Buzz also said, but the rip-off Star Wars backstory that's literally the only thing Toy Story gave us to explain who Buzz is or what a Space Range does is quite incompatible with the story we get here. Anyway, I am much happier dropping this line of thought; Lightyear is crummy enough without having to gag down the fact that it's just a sad, strange little piece of brand extension that represents maybe the single most craven "we own the universe, fuck you" gesture made by the greater Walt Disney Company since Ralph Breaks the Internet.
So, taking this a standalone project, a 2022 movie made for 2022 audiences: it's boring, badly-paced, and has a very sloppy script, emotionally neutered characters, and excruciatingly bad jokes; but it looks pretty nice. Pixar films always look nice, of course. They are the nicest-looking films modern American filmmaking is capable of producing, arguably; at the very least, they have the best lighting designers in contemporary CG animation, working with the fastest computers running the best rendering software. So it is maybe a cheat that Lightyear looks very gorgeous, as it creates an alien planet with a heavy, dusty sky and bold sunsets, spaceships full of sleek ice-blue lighting, and a good mix of fancifully realistic-ish character designs whose smooth simplicity helps tell us most of what we need to know about the characters' personalities from the moment we see them. But it's a cheat that works.
Still, "looks nice" isn't special, and Lightyear is in desperate need of something special to offset its rank garbage fire of a script. In brief: there's a sleeper ship that has left Earth looking for a planet to colonise, and Space Rangers Buzz Lightyear, Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), and Featheringhamstan the rookie (Bill Hader) are woken up to explore it. They quickly determine it's uninhabitable due to malevelont sentient vines, and in an attempt to escape the, Buzz crashes their ship - it is quite difficult to make out, based on how this is presented, whether he could have actually prevented this from happening, but it's meant to motivate his intense feelings of guilt, so let's assume not. The Space Rangers wake up the rest of the ship's crew to build a temporary settlement while the ship is repaired and its volatile fuel cells re-built. The fuel turns out to be the big problem: after a year, the ship is ready to go, but every time Buzz flies out to test the fuel cell, it ends up sputtering out before he's able to make sufficient speed to do... the thing, that part also isn't clear. But he does go fast enough for relativistic time dilation to kick in, so he keeps losing four years at a go, spending a couple of weeks or so of his own life running tests while Hawthorne dies of old age and the settlement grows from survival mode to become an actual thriving colony. By this point, the fuel is working, but when Buzz comes out of hyperspace to learn this, the planet has been overrun by hostile alien robots, and only three humans are out in the open, rather than trapped in the single city they've built. They're also three hapless rookie Space Ranger wannabes: Mo Morrison (Taika Waititi), Darby Steel (Dale Soules), and Hawthorne's granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer). And also Buzz has his robot therapy cat SOX (Peter Sohn, an animator and story artist at Pixar and elsewhere who ascended to the ranks of senior creative team member after finishing up directing the plagued 2015 release The Good Dinosaur).
In other words, Buzz has lost about a century, and every person he ever knew is dead, including his dear, dear friend Alisha, and Lightyear can squeeze exactly no emotional resonance out of this. A friend of mine made the peerless comparison to Up, back when Pixar still knew what they were doing, which has a legendarily emotional opening montage that's functionally identical to Lightyear's puffy, go-nowhere opening act, and breaks your heart as easily as cracking an egg. Even giving us considerably more time to know Alisha than Up gave us with Ellie, there's no comparing how much emptier this all feels. The opening act of Lightyear is, indeed, pretty shallow and empty across the board. There is, for one thing, how completely unnecessary it is: why, pray tell, other than that ostensibly affecting montage, do we need Buzz to make several different test flights? Just one flight, going wrong (or right in the wrong way) can get us 60 or 80 years in the future and absolutely everything else can proceed as normal. But instead, we get this protracted nothingness, in which the film writes I don't know how many checks it has no intention of cashing about Buzz's character arc (the inner conflict he resolves at the end is not the same as the inner conflict established up front, and there's never a point where that first conflict gets resolved), introduces questions and characters who get cleanly wiped off the board once Buzz arrives in the evil robot future, and just generally provides the most tedious, genuinely unwatchable material in Pixar's entire history. I would, gratefully, watch all of Cars 2 again rather than the opening 30 minutes of Lightyear.
It improves from there, as it almost has to - and it finds a way to get very, very bad again, once it supplies us with the most ill-considered twist villain reveal that Pixar or its sister studio, Walt Disney Animation, has ever crapped out in the assumption that the grand surprise of it will distract us from what an incoherent hash it makes of its characters - but even when everything is clicking in the middle, Lightyear can't do better than to rise up to the level of adequate mediocrity. Izzy, Mo, and Darby are pretty godawful characters, especially the latter two: they're the designated comic relief, and Lightyear has some of the most conspicuously bad comedy Pixar has ever punished us with. It feels like the machinery of jokes is in place, but the jokes themselves are not. There's this odd extended bit about how in The Future, there are sandwiches with meat on the outside and bread on the inside, and it surely feels like a gag, but it's such a weirdly morose one that I cannot fathom what's meant to be "funny". There's a long running gag about pens that ends up paying off in a sort of joke, but never feels like that prior to the payoff. Many of Soules's line deliveries have the cadence of a sassy grandma character in a shticky sitcom, but often without punchlines; many of Waititi's line deliveries feel laconic and distracted, even when there is a punchline.
SOX works; SOX is funny. SOX is basically "R2-D2, but as a cat", and while some bits go on past the point of going stale (saying "meow" instead of beeping is funny exactly once; it is used I think thrice), Sohn has the best line deliveries and SOX gets the best comic business. At one point, the robot accidentally starts emitting a red laser dot and begins chasing it, narrating its progress as it goes; this was the only time in the entire movie I made an audible laughter-like sound.
Anyway, remove SOX, and you have removed the only interesting and largely successful character in Lightyear. Not the only point of interest altogether: the production design mostly works, and there are some very good sci-fi action setpieces scattered across the film's latter two thirds. Still, the best the film can offer as "mildly diverting in an extremely generic way", and it is borderline impossible to care about the title character's travails. I mean, the whole point of Buzz Lightyear was that he was a pompous idiot compiled solely out of clichés; it makes sense that a story built around him would struggle to do anything whatsoever with his anti-presence other than throw a cute cat at him to distract us for a bit. Apparently it didn't make sense to the higher-ups at the studio, though, and therein lies the tragedy.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
