LM23 Rating: Chris Evans does just fine as Buzz Lightyear
Beyond the controversy of a lesbian relationship and Chris Evans taking over the vocal reins of Buzz from Tim Allen, Lightyear is on its own a solid movie. Maybe it’s the extraneous negative chatter about things other than the film itself or maybe it’s because Lightyear doesn’t feature catchy song interludes or fuzzy wuzzy characters that people seem to be downvoting Lightyear. But make no mistake that Lightyear stands on its own as a solid Pixar film.
Lightyear is the movie that Andy from Toy Story watched that made him love the toy Buzz Lightyear so much. And in the movie, we are introduced to Buzz Lightyear as a cocky, but loyal space ranger. He doesn’t depend on things like autopilot and he sure as hell will not drag himself down by having to babysit rookies and noobies who don’t know what they’re doing. But that doesn’t mean that Buzz himself is immune from mistakes.
At the start of the film, Buzz makes a humongous mistake which causes him and his fellow rangers including his best friend and Commander Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) to be trapped on another planet with no way to get home. And Buzz is willing and able to try again and again to travel at hypersonic speeds until he can go fast enough that they can all head home.
But something strange happens every time Buzz takes off. The entire mission takes less than five minutes, but in reality, Buzz is actually gone for several years at a time. Buzz remains the same age, but the people left behind are gradually aging as he keeps on going on the test missions. We see Commander Hawthorne live her life as she becomes engaged and eventually gets married and have children. There’s just something really sad when you see these types of time elapsing montages in movies or TV shows. You know that eventually, the characters will grow old and ultimately die. It was so heartbreaking when Buzz returns from yet another test mission, he opens the door to Hawthorne’s office, but she is no longer there. Instead, she has left behind a recorded video message for him in which she is in a hospital bed and says her final goodbye to him.
If you sit back and think about this scene, you start to feel very sad for Buzz. He’s so committed to righting his wrong and is so singularly focused on doing that one thing that he neglected his relationships and life on the ground. He was working, working, working, while his good friend Alisha went through her own journey and he missed out on all of it. Alisha created a life for herself and left behind a legacy, but Buzz was always out in outerspace and although he retained his youth, Buzz has nobody. And when Alisha died, so did his connection to his former life. Ironically, the only real friend he has left is an orange robotic cat named Sox gifted to him from Alisha. Sox is part confidante and part therapy pet for Buzz. Sox is smarter than most humans and helps Buzz figure out what was wrong with the fuel such that they should be able to get the speed they need to fly home.
But with the death of Alisha, a new commander named Burnside has a new plan. They’re going to give up on the mission of getting home and instead, accept their new life here and focus instead on protecting their manufactured home with a force field. But Buzz isn’t giving up. He’s going to give it one more shot.
Buzz defies his orders and with Sox, he steals a ship and goes off on his mission one more time. And this time, they do make it to that hypersonic speed they needed to head home. But when they return to their base, things don’t look the same. Everyone is gone and evil robots have appeared to taken over their home base. But not everyone is evil. Turns out there are three people still around who are willing to fight. One of these people is Izzy Hawthorne, Alisha’s grand daughter. But there’s one big problem and it’s that Izzy (Keke Palmer), Mo (Taika Waititi) and Darby (Dale Soules) are not trained in combat.
The rag tag bunch do their best to make do with that why have, but Buzz is resistant to officially welcoming them into his inner circle. There’s a great scene where they’re trapped by cones and the three newbies are trying to use their body weight to smash a control box, but they need Buzz to join them. Buzz was really reluctant to join in and you wonder why when it’s life or death, wouldn’t Buzz be okay to team up with them.
Turns out, Buzz isn’t that great of a guy. Yes, he’s a hot shot space ranger, but he’s also selfish and unwilling to be patient and share his knowledge with others. He dismisses anyone who already isn’t at his level and even when the chips are down, he doesn’t see himself as being on the same team as those who are beneath him. But Buzz eventually admits that he, too, made a lot of mistakes when he started out. And it was Alisha who saw something in him that he was able to continue his training as a space ranger. Accepting that people make mistakes is one of the big themes of Lightyear.
A huge surprise in the plot of the movie is that the evil bad guy is actually an old version of Buzz. Somehow, during one of Buzz’s many test missions, time and space became mixed up and one version of Buzz was able to go further into time, hence why he’s much older. But now he wants to see if it’s possible to go backwards in time and that’s why he needs Buzz’s fuel. If they can go back to the time before they even went on this mission, they can stop all of this from happening.
But Buzz isn’t so sure. His friends are here now because of his initial mistake. Alisha was able to have a life and have a granddaughter named Izzy because Buzz was out on the test missions. If they were to return back in time, Izzy and the rest of the gang would not be here.
I don’t think anyone saw this plot twist coming. And come to think of it, there’s really no predicting what Lightyear is truly about. Sure, it’s about accepting mistakes and you’re only as strong as the weakest member of your team. But the additional theme of being able to rewrite history was perhaps just a little too farfetched.
Lightyear could have been stronger if the evil robots were simply evil extraterrestrials. But, when they beat the evil robots, maybe they all have their chance to go home, but they realize that home is here. And they can continue with their lives there as they have basically lived their entire lives there already.
Except for that unnecessary plot twist, Lightyear is a good movie. I appreciate it when animated films don’t always rely on cute animals and songs to get their messages across. Lightyear is more in line with Soul and Onward. Both did not fare as well as the other more traditional Pixar films, but they are their own genres.
Forget about the Tim Allen and LGBTQ noise. Chris Evans is the perfect Buzz and Alisha Hawthorne’s family is like any other family. Go see Lightyear.
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