Review: Pixar’s Lightyear squanders its sci-fi reboot potential

[Karlston]

Solid family fare but overshadowed by better Pixar films like Wall-E, Toy Story.

 

This Buzz Lightyear is supposed to be the "real-life" version of the character, which the real-life humans in Toy Story saw before buying the cuter toy version of the Buzz character. Still with me? Yes, this week's new Pixar film is weird.

Disney / Pixar

 

Hollywood has produced quite a few superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy "origin" films, which rewind a series' timeline to take a deeper look at a popular character. But I'm not sure we've ever seen a film that goes to the trouble of telling the origin story... of a manufactured toy in a fictional universe.

 

That is what this week's Lightyear is: a fictional film that explains why a fictional toy was created in another fictional film. The overly serious Toy Story hero Buzz Lightyear, full of catch phrases and push-action tricks on his plastic spacesuit, wasn't originally a children's cartoon character, Pixar now says. The toy we grew to love was actually the children's-toy version of a serious "live-action" sci-fi hero—or, at least, live in the way that Andy was a "real" person in the Toy Story universe.

 

Buzz looks lost—in more ways than one.

Disney / Pixar

 

Part of me hoped that such a twist on an existing fictional character would let Pixar run wild with classic sci-fi inspirations. But that's not what Lightyear is. This new film, debuting exclusively in theaters, is nowhere near the tribute to past boundary-pushing blockbusters that its trailer suggested.

 

Instead, it awkwardly splits the difference between a '90s Bruckheimer flick and a modern Pixar family romp. The result is, unsurprisingly, a perfectly watchable film, and it comes with the usual Pixar standards of top-tier digital animation effects, solid voice acting, likable characters, and moments both touching and hilarious. But unless you're a preteen at roughly the same age as Toy Story's Andy, you'll likely feel shortchanged by the film as a whole.

“This is that film”

The film opens with a standard Star Ranger mission, in which Buzz is joined by a partner that, for some reason, never got her own toys in the Toy Story universe.

Disney / Pixar

 

An early text crawl opens the film with direct mentions of Toy Story's timeline, along with a suggestion that Lightyear was Andy's favorite film as a kid. "This is that film," the text concludes. A redesigned Buzz Lightyear, now voiced by Chris Evans (Captain America) with a very Tim Allen-like affectation and an actual mop of hair, lands a massive shuttle spacecraft onto an unfamiliar planet. When that landing goes awry, he, his Space Rangers, and hundreds of military personnel are trapped and unable to return to Earth due to a newly broken warp drive.

 

Though this opening scene sets up his solid rapport with another Space Ranger (played by Uzo Aduba, Orange Is the New Black), that bond is soon interrupted by a massive plot rug-pull. To keep spoilers to a minimum, Buzz gets caught up in a guilt spiral over the failed landing, and he chooses to plow ahead with an idea that could get his entire crew back home. This obsession leads to a massive schism between him and the rest of his crew.

 

The new, ragtag crew.

Disney / Pixar

 

So much so, in fact, that the film resets at the 30-minute mark to introduce a new supporting cast. The well-trained Space Rangers vanish, and they're replaced by a ragtag trio of space-colony outcasts. Their apparent leader, a young woman named Izzy (voiced by Keke Palmer), has more ambition and excitement than she does experience.

The emperor has Sox, but no clothes

Izzy, Sox, and Buzz figure out a plan.

Disney / Pixar

 

The best thing about Lightyear is how Buzz and Izzy make the most of a cliché action-movie archetype, where a plucky, inexperienced recruit shows the stubborn, crotchety leader something new about themselves. The plot dumps a lot of baggage onto Izzy, and Palmer does a tremendous job selling the burden her character carries while summoning believable levels of enthusiasm and hope. By this point in the film, Evans has given up on pantomiming Tim Allen's take on the character and delivers a pitch-perfect straight-man foil to Izzy.

 

In these two characters, there's something for any kid in the audience to bond with and appreciate, and that might be reason enough for your family to get tickets to this one.

 

Sox looks weird in an "uncanny valley" way, right? That's the point. And Pixar does a fantastic job mining humor out of this fact.

Disney / Pixar

 

But for a Pixar film that caters to families with young kids, Lightyear is absolutely aching for better relationships between its characters and more comic relief among them. Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows) clearly aims for laughs with his goofy performance, but his character's lack of confidence leaves him mostly bumbling about in an unfunny fashion. The film's saving grace in the humor department is Peter Sohn, a longtime Pixar animator and occasional voice actor, who is entrusted with the scene-stealing delight that is Sox, an animatronic cat that aids Buzz in his journey.

 

A brief Sox appreciation gallery. Sox as a companion.

 

Sox as a USB drive.

 

Sox as a voice assistant.

 

Sox is not just Lightyear's best character. It's maybe one of Pixar's funniest creations in the past decade. Sohn's turn as a voice actor is instantly charming. Sox's visual gags of helpful machinery popping out of his robo-cat body are always clever. And Pixar takes advantage of the inherent uncanny valley in CGI to make Sox look believably weird by way of its glossy eyes clashing with a body made of plastic and fine fur patterns and then mines humor out of Buzz's initial unease with the companion.

 

Yet, even this awesome character ruins the film's believability within the Toy Story universe. Are you telling us Andy saw this movie and didn't beg for a Sox toy, Pixar? I don't buy it.

To a single planet—and within

This technicolor blast of warp-speed flight is the exception in Lightyear, not the rule.

 

As far as a "serious" sci-fi adventure, however, Lightyear feels far from infinitesimal. In fact, the whole film is downright claustrophobic. Much of the film takes place inside an outpost that's established when Buzz crashes onto an unknown planet, and he and his fellow Space Rangers never blast off to other planets.

 

Away from the outpost, we see one generic abandoned military outpost, one generic bad-guy spaceship interior, and one open desert-planet landscape. The planet in question isn't overrun with varied aliens; instead, we see roughly two dozen of the same bipedal robot. And the film gets nowhere near establishing the fun, planet-stomping tone that you might expect from "Andy's favorite movie" (let alone the straight-to-video Buzz Lightyear movies that once dominated Blockbuster shelves). I would love to have seen Pixar's CGI team re-create the cheap-yet-ambitious practical fare of '70s series like Star Trek or Buck Rogers, or perhaps they could have honored Andy's '90s time period by imitating campy romps like Starship Troopers or Independence Day.

 

My review doesn't even go into the toothless conflict established by a familiar-looking villain (who comes with a new 2022 twist).

Disney / Pixar

 

As a hero character who aspires to "infinity and beyond," though, Buzz is chained to a sci-fi conceit that results in a limited world—and I must say, the film's early world-shrinking plot twist lacks believability. Buzz repeatedly fails the same world-saving attempt, and Pixar never clues viewers in to his motivations; we're stuck watching his repeated failures without any access point for empathy.

 

For all of my negativity, I freely admit that even an underwhelming Pixar film is still generally quite good. On my personal Pixar scale, Lightyear lands above Cars, below A Bug's Life, and well below last year's fantastic straight-to-Disney+ Turning Red. But we've previously seen Pixar make "isolated, experimental sci-fi" work in a family-friendly context in the form of Wall-E—and in every metric that counts, Lightyear falls short of that 2008 classic.

 

So, honestly, I'd suggest rewatching that film again at your home or picking out other family-friendly sci-fi classics, like The Iron Giant or Galaxy Quest, before settling on Lightyear in theaters this summer.

 

Final Lightyear trailer.

 

 

Review: Pixar’s Lightyear squanders its sci-fi reboot potential