There should be some sort of term for what Pixar’s gone through over the last decade and how they’ve managed to escape critical scrutiny. Between their evolving emphasis on producing the lamest sequels known to man as a way of cementing the “Pixar brand” and pleasing shareholders, seeing their ideas poached by rival studios (remember Newt?), having behind-the-scenes controversy for what seemed like the first time ever, and, finally, as their parent company relegates their original concepts – by far and away what they were best known for, once upon a time – to streaming, far from the kind of publicity that something like Angus MacLane’s Lightyear will get on the Disney family of networks, it’s been a rough time for them. And it has largely passed by unnoticed. Call it the Cars 2 effect, where there’s a clear outlier in terms of quality that everyone can point to and go “Well, at least it’s not Cars 2,” as a way of softening the inevitable and creeping sense of disappointment as they begin to realize that the Pixar of Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and the original Toy Story films isn’t coming back anytime soon. Instead, that assortment of creative and talented people – call it Pixar, unitalicized – who were able to make mass entertainment that stimulated and moved audiences all over the world, has been replaced by Pixar, which is a collection of intellectual properties that are being strip-mined for all they’re worth. Lightyear is what it looks like when those excavators start to get their first shovelfuls of pure dirt as they’ve made their way through the mineral deposit, an intangible sense of desperation hanging in the air as they try to figure out what the hell to do with what they’ve got left.
There’s been a sizable amount of confusion online as to what the hell is exactly going on with Lightyear, and I don’t consider it to be breaking the Vow of Silence as required of me in the embargo I agreed to when I watched it last week to tell you details that come in the first 30 seconds of the film. As spelled out in pre-title cards, Lightyear is a movie that exists within the world of Toy Story (Andy’s favorite, can you believe that?) whose main character, Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Chris Evans), is what Buzz Lightyear (the toy, played by Tim Allen) was fashioned after. It is not a film about a real astronaut or whatever who inspired a toy – it is much lamer than that. One can see the opportunities left on the table within minutes of it starting: This is supposed to be a film from 1995, yet every single aspect of the movie is modern in incredibly flattering ways as if the Walt Disney Company would have actually put out a film so perfectly aligned with modern progressive values at the exact same time they were releasing… Pocahontas. Perhaps the only acknowledgment that this film is technically retro-futuristic comes when Buzz pulls the autopilot out of his spaceship’s console and blows on it as if it were a Nintendo cartridge, and that occurs within the first 20 minutes.
Anyhow, enough ranting about a wholesale lack of imagination on the part of a studio release – I spent 1,500 words doing that last week when Jurassic World came out – let’s hit Pixar where it really hurts: Their much-lauded commitment to character and storytelling above everything else. Lightyear plays like an emotionally-stunted version of Interstellar (which, yeah, sure, you go ahead and laugh at how that’s oxymoronic or whatever, but there’s more genuine feeling in a 20-second scan of the score than anything here), with our lead character’s stoicism fucking everything up for a whole bunch of space colonists. Buzz and his captain Alisha (Uzo Adoba) are on some sort of mission in a ship shaped like a giant turnip (dubbed so by Buzz himself), carrying a payload of anonymous people like they’re the Botany Bay, only these aren’t genetic mutants or supermen. The planet seems inhospitable: immediately, giant vines and bugs make themselves known to our heroes, and Buzz’s hasty attempts at an escape wind up crashing the ship and destroying the hyperdrive. So, the Space Ranger devotes himself to finding a new formulation for the ship’s fuel and goes about testing it. It’s a failure, of course, but even worse, four years have passed since he’s taken off, even though he’s only experienced it as four minutes from his vantage – time dilation sucks, huh? But because he can’t forgive himself for this critical error, he doubles down on his quest and keeps pressing on with the flights.
Every one of his buds that he began the journey with begins to age rapidly, up until his captain passes away while he’s on his voyage. The new boss doesn’t have the same commitment to the mission that she did – the people on the planet are happy, after all, and why do they need to go back to Space Command or whatever anyway — and Buzz is forced to jack a ship alongside his robot therapy cat, Socks (Pete Sohn), who, in the 60 years since their first meeting, has figured out the right way to make the fuel. So, of course, the test works, Buzz thinks he’ll be greeted as a hero when he makes it back to the planet’s surface. Wrong. While he was fucking around in space, robots have invaded the planet and are laying siege to the nascent city surrounding the Turnip, only protected by a laser wall erected to keep the vines and bugs out. He’s nearly attacked by one of the robots following a crash landing, only to be rescued by his Captain’s granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer), a plucky wannabe ranger who, unfortunately, suffers from a pretty debilitating case of space-phobia. Along with two other misfits – an elderly parolee (Darby Steel) and a ne’er-do-well slacker (Taika Waititi) – Buzz, Socks, and Izzy will have to try their best to fend off the alien invaders, and learn exactly what (or who) is leading them, only called “Zurg” (James Brolin) by the robo-underlings that surround it inside its giant capital ship. And, you guessed it, friends: Everybody’s gotta fulfill the demands of their arcs and also smash up some robots while they’re doing it.
It’s actually kind of astonishing how thoroughly Pixar missed the point of the Buzz Lightyear character in Toy Story when making this, though it’s perhaps to be expected after all the personnel changes the company’s been through since 1995. McFarlane and his co-writers rightly diagnose that the character’s stoicism and self-seriousness is his main flaw, but they fail to understand that his purpose is comic relief. Without the humorous conflict that he creates with Woody and the rest of the toys in Andy’s room, he’s wholly generic, a series of attributes and cliches pulled from other media, none of which would be considered compelling in their own right outside of that context. Remember, they tried to do this once before, in a significantly more amusing and traditional way, back when the spin-off cartoon Buzz Lightyear of Star Command aired a few decades ago. That show, at least, was able to be goofy and appropriately silly, given its medium, stylized after the older Duck Dodgers cartoons and unbeholden to the kind of melodramatic horseshit that we’ve dubbed “good storytelling” and the kind of tired banter that passes for comedy in what feels like every Disney release these days.
There’s no compelling reason to care beyond our passing familiarity with the character from other media, which is what makes the entire enterprise so baffling: If this was supposedly the (fictional) introduction to a (fictional) character that inspired a (fictional) toy craze, why does it this resemble Remo Williams more than fucking Star Wars? I’ll spare you the lengthy Top Gun: Maverick comparison I had planned for this review (a dead horse I will return to caning throughout the summer, I imagine), but it’s notable how a smaller-scale film has immediately larger and more personal stakes, even while relying on a similar sort of character shorthand – Maverick’s gonna lose his job and won’t get to fly again, which somehow feels more dire and urgent than, you know, a colony ship potentially marooning hundreds of people on a foreign planet.
But, then again, Maverick had a creative force behind it, in the form of Tom Cruise, who is a selfless advocate for himself as well as a lover of cinema, whereas Lightyear only has market demands guiding it. This is Disney pre-anticipating the needs of what is slowly becoming their most devoted audience: The Disney Adult, which has sustained them through remakes and reboots and so forth. I don’t mean to play into the kind of horseshit complaints that so many self-serious nerds have about other nerds needing to “grow up” or whatever when it comes to the composition of their media consumption, and, of course, one can like Disney products and parks and whatnot without falling into the category of person that label is often affixed to. But they know there’s an uncritical consumer base – beyond that of the average family with nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon – that remembers Toy Story well enough and is intrigued by the idea of a self-serious Buzz Lightyear science-fiction film enough to take it in on its merits, and their expectations are precisely what Pixar is aiming to meet. They want a story that suggests meaning, but won’t commit to making it; that reminds them of aspects of their childhood imaginations without tainting them with any sort of originality unimplied by the source material; and they want a cute cat that makes some decent jokes every once in a while, much like in Captain Marvel. And, well, Pixar hit on that last one, that cat is pretty cute. But it’s frustrating how far the bar has fallen that that is enough for folks. But, hey, at least it’s not Cars 2, huh? Yet as cynical as Cars 2 was, there’s something particularly hopeless about Lightyear that just makes it feel all the more bitter: At least the former was, certifiably, for kids.