Lightyear review: an ambitious sci-fi movie with a familiar Pixar message

Tumblr has provided a popular meme that has been critical of Pixar Animation Studios’ movies for seven years. Granted, it’s an insightful meme. The idea that Pixar movies all boil down to “What if [random object] had feelings?” does hold water, and given how much the studio built its name on the idea of evoking profound, powerful adult emotions in animated movies, it’s an understandable lens for viewing Pixar work.

But the studio’s new science fiction movie Lightyear suggests another way of looking at Pixar that’s a little less simple, but just as relevant. Arguably, Pixar’s strongest movies are about people (or toys, rats, robots, anthropomorphized emotions, etc.) Deciding how to accept their differences and live together. Lightyear Pixar has a bold story that explores new territory with an ambitious story about an alien society and a human world. It focuses on the struggles of one man with his failures and loss over the past half century. It is a return to the core Pixar idea of opening yourself up to others as a way to find a safe place in this world. That should be a resonant theme — certainly past Pixar movies, from From the InsideTo UpTo Coco Return to the original Toy StoryThese powerful narratives are based on the same message. But Lightyear takes such a disjointed, surface-level approach to the idea that it doesn’t land as powerfully as it should.

Lightyear has a slightly complicated place in Pixar’s franchise thinking. It’s meant to be a fictional artifact from the Toy Story world: Your favorite sci-fi movie Toy Story’s central human character, Andy. Toy Story’s toy version of Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen) is a piece of merch from the Lightyear movie, where Buzz is a human astronaut (voiced by the MCU’s Captain America, Chris Evans), part of an elite team of Space Rangers. You can find bits and pieces about Lightyear’s arc implied throughout the Toy Story movies — like Buzz’s various pull-string catchphrases and the existence of his big purple robot enemy Zurg — were all elements Finding Dory Angus MacLane, co-director and Jason Headley, co-writer (Continue readingIn plotting, he had to contend with Lightyear. In an interview with Polygon, MacLane stated that the prior was ignored by them Toy Story animated spinoff, 2000’s film and TV series Buzz Lightyear, Star Command.)

Image: Pixar

However, these connections should not be overlooked LightyearIt is intended to be read as an adult science fiction story and not as a film geared towards 6-year-olds such as Andy. This explains some its more important ideas. The film’s opening scene shows Buzz aboard the ship, a bulky, bulbous vessel filled with cryogenically frozen scientists. Buzz, his commanding officer Alisha and their ship are diverted to examine life signs on the planet. Buzz attempts to navigate the ship around the planet but is unsuccessful. He also miscalculates and damages the fuel crystal, which allows him to take the ship into hyperspace, leaving the ship stranded in hostile terrain.

Buzz is obsessed with repairing his mistake and embarks on several experiments to explore space for new fuel crystals. Because he travels at the speed of light, the time passes slower for him than it did for the colonists. After every mission, most of which blur by in a quick montage, he returns to find Alisha older — first married to a woman she met while he was gone, then with young children, then adult children, and so forth. The colonists move on as well, settling in on their new planet and adapting to it, until they finally decide there’s no point in devoting resources to Buzz’s ongoing mission.

That’s a lot to take in as just the scene-setting for the actual action of the film. Too much of it whips by as if there are no questions to be asked and nothing worth mentioning about the ship’s original mission or the society it came from, the time that passes between Buzz’s missions, or whether anyone questions them before they finally drop the hammer. There’s nothing in that setup about how Buzz lives from one day to the next when he’s on the planet, or whether Alisha ever tries to talk him out of his obsessive space jaunts. It’s all presented as the basic buy-in for the rest of the movie, which deals with Buzz’s refusal to accept the future he’s suddenly found himself in, and his struggle to let go of the past.

Flash Gordon’s space adventure, packed full of fast-moving alien creepy crawlies, snappy banter and huge explosive action. Lightyear This is a very entertaining movie. There’s a lot of funny business about Buzz narrating his actions as if he’s the hero in a space serial, and a strange, silly scene about the sandwiches of the future. It’s no wonder all this would appeal to Andy and his generation, who likely see it much like 6-year-olds in our world might: as an exciting rush through a world packed with killer robots, icky monster-bugs, and cool laser swords.

But Lightyear It is clearly designed to become something else: A thoughtful meditation on time passing. All of its major ideas point to the necessity to be connected with people, and to live in the now rather than in the past. It’s a warning about all the things we might miss if we fixate on past mistakes instead of letting them go. And on that level, the film never hits as hard as it’s meant to.

Image: Pixar

In part, that’s because the script spends too much time explaining those themes. In part, it’s because there’s so much other business getting in the way. Buzz was given Sox by a robotic cat named Sox to assist him in adapting to his time skips. (voiced by The Good DinosaurPeter Sohn, director), is full of hilarious visual and verbal gags. But he never fulfills his primary purpose. Buzz’s new allies Izzy (Keke Palmer), Mo (Taika Waititi), and Darby (Dale Soules) each get micro-arcs of their own, but they’re largely underdeveloped characters who mostly exist to remind Buzz that he needs to learn the value of teamwork — a moral lesson that crops up so often in kids’ movies that it’s hard to see it as an adult value here.

This arc is very familiar. Buzz refuses to take on a rookie for his mission with Alisha in the set-up sequence. He insists that he works alone and doesn’t need help or input from others. He’s echoing another big-chinned hero who has to learn the value of teamwork: Mr. Incredible, whose similar rejection of a rookie sidekick in the opening sequence of Pixar’s The Amazings This movie is about the plot.

But Lightyear doesn’t have the same narrative neatness or force. Buzz continues to echo his “I’ve got this, I don’t need help” line as he’s making his big mistake, but there’s no real evidence that teamwork could have solved the problem, or that the rookie he’s shoving aside had anything to offer. His error stems more from overconfidence in his own abilities, and not listening to the ship’s computerized autopilot. There’s only a slight disjunction between “accept other people’s help” and “listen to a robot’s calculations,” but it’s still a fairly serious one that highlights the little ways Lightyear doesn’t entirely connect its emotional dots. When Zurg finally emerges — and unlike so many recent Pixar movies, Lightyear is absolutely a story with an actual old-school villain — there’s a thematic connection to the film’s morals there as well, but one that doesn’t fully make sense within the world MacLane and Headley have laid out.

All of it is a waste.Lightyear from being a satisfying experience in any given scene, as Buzz and his various teammates outfight aliens and out-think robots, all on the road to the inevitable moment where Buzz finds a way to accept his life and what he’s made of it. It’s the way the bits and pieces add up that make it difficult to get into the characters. MacLane’s Pixar talent is clearly on display as he and his crew fill the screen full of a sophisticated, engaging world filled with emotive, likeable characters. (Notably, many of them are people of color in roles that don’t revolve around their racial heritage — a welcome reflection of Pixar’s ongoing steps forward in on-screen representation.)

But they’re up against so many past Pixar successes that mine similar emotions and ideas. While they may have different designs, the majority of them are stronger because they have more passion. Many of the most memorable Pixar films are about people trying to achieve a dream. Lightyear makes it clear early on that its hero’s dream is unworthy and misguided, making it harder for viewers to fully engage with his battle to make it happen. (Headley’s Continue readingThe climax is similar, but the movie still lets its audience feel for the heros throughout.

That dream could have deeper roots, if it is rooted in reality. Lightyear Buzz spent some time figuring out who he was in this world. It’s clear what he’s lost, but not what he values: It’s clear who he is, but not who he wants to be. Certainly viewers will fill in those blanks themselves based on what they value, but that rush to put all the narrative pieces in place leaves too many of the details in viewers’ hands. This is what you see through the Tumblr lens. Lightyear could be summed up as: “What if people wracked with guilt and regret had feelings?” But seen as another Pixar film about acceptance and connection, it feels like a less heartfelt, more calculated echo of some of the studio’s more personal projects. It’s a familiar message, in a pleasantly shiny but visibly flawed new shell.

LightyearOn June 17, the film will debut in theatres