Reviewing - Lightyear (***)
It’s a decent sci-fi flick – but it’s not a Buzz Lightyear movie.
To anyone who lived through the 90s, there’s little use in explaining the character of Buzz Lightyear. We all get it. He’s a larger-than-life hero who takes himself way too seriously, and his inability to understand the real world sometimes gets him in trouble. He’s a critical figure not just to the Toy Story franchise, but to Pixar as a whole. So when it was first announced that they were making a movie about Lightyear – the actual space ranger – I was thrilled. After all, in my childhood I had been a huge fan of the animated Buzz Lightyear TV show Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. The show was action-packed, tongue-in-cheek, and wildly fun. Best of all, it captured the heart and soul of Buzz Lightyear. Even though Buzz was in the science fiction world that was nothing but fiction in the Toy Story movies, he was every bit the melodramatic do-gooder that we’d met in Pixar’s films. It blows my mind that the show and its direct-to-video film haven’t been given more attention from Disney and Pixar in recent years, particularly in the buildup to this film’s release. My only guess is that because the series was animated by Disney and not Pixar, Pixar may feel that the show isn’t a true child of theirs – and therefore deserves to be kicked to the curb.
But even if you’ve never seen the TV show, you still likely had a clear image of what this movie should’ve been: an uber-righteous hero doing battle with a comically sinister villain across the galaxy. And for some reason or other, that’s exactly what this movie wasn’t. Buzz spends virtually the entire film on one planet. He’s much less of a cartoon (intentionally so), attempting to trade humour for heart. Ultimately, the end result is a movie that explores time travel in great depth without ever really giving us the Buzz Lightyear we know and love.
I’m not knocking Chris Evans’ performance, or really any individual component of the film. The animation was stellar, as always. The jokes that were in there definitely landed. The time travel concept was an intriguing – perhaps even overly ambitious – direction for a family-oriented film. The action was great too. It just didn’t capture the heart of Lightyear the way that any Toy Story project has in the past, and certainly not the way that the animated television show did. Like Lightyear himself in this film, you won’t necessarily walk away feeling cheated – but you won’t be able to help wondering what this film could have looked like in another timeline.