Lightyear (2022)

Score: 3 / 5

This is not a Toy Story film. In fact, according to the opening text, it's the film from the '90s that Andy loved so much that his mother bought him a Buzz Lightyear toy. It's a clever idea, especially as the voice of the character is provided by Chris Evans rather than Tim Allen. As such, this isn't a cute little romp around Andy's house or the neighborhood with a bunch of toys. This is a knockoff space opera, a sort of dangerous middle ground between a lot of other popular intellectual properties. Really the only way this film fits into the franchise is through its attempts to showcase the origins of Buzz's now culturally common catchphrases. It's annoying in that Lightyear, then, is clearly a ploy for fans' money, but it also fits nicely into the world of the franchise (remember that Woody is also a famed character from retro television). But, for now, to infinity and beyond!

Buzz and his partner Alisha (Uzo Aduba) are awoken when their Star Command ship gets rerouted to investigate an unexplored planet. After "The Turnip" crashes, thanks to hostile life forms, the team sets up camp to begin work on a new hyperspace crystal they need to return home. It's a frenzied, weird start to the film, and a lengthy montage shows their repeated attempts to test run the tech. Buzz volunteered to fly the experimental runs, but each run takes much longer than he expects due to time warping near celestial bodies. Each minute he spends in a run ages his teammates on the planet an entire year. Fueled by his desire to fuel their homeward journey, Buzz squanders their time together, seeing her life in snippets every four years or so until, after a dozen runs, he returns to the tragic news that Alisha is dead. Thankfully, she gifted him an AI robot therapist in the form of a cat, named Sox, to help him.

With the repeated failures, Star Command decides to launch a colony on this planet, rather than wasting more time and resources to escape, even when Buzz finally solves the puzzle. Successfully using hyperspace, Buzz returns 22 years in the future when Alisha's granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer) is a young adult fighting an army of robots attempting to invade the colony. It's yet another drastic plot twist in a story already pretty unfocused, but this is where things finally start to get interesting because the robots look suspiciously like Zurg from the earlier installments. Indeed, that character appears later as Buzz's archenemy, and yes, Zurg is in fact someone very close to our hero.

There are lots of things to unpack here, including Alisha's lesbian identity, the visibility of strong Black women working in space, and the occasionally toxic masculinity Buzz exhibits (he's so stubborn and isolationist in his ballsy approach to every problem). But they're really only worth discussing if you really love this movie and want to dig in deep. I found most of this film beautiful -- the animation really is stunning -- but vapid, a generous helping of fan service and reappropriated ideas mashed into an existing IP Disney desperately needs to keep fresh. After all, the Toy Story area of Hollywood Studios can hardly sell itself! Then again, if this film is meant to be an homage to classic '80s and '90s space-venturing movie, it fits the bill in spades regarding how they worked, minus any appreciation of how they felt to viewers. Several shots felt ripped from Star Trek, Star Wars, Avatar, and even 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Generally, there's just not a lot to remember here, even if it's fun while it lasts. Sox the "cat" feels like a cheap ploy for Christmas gifts this year, and the much-reported gay content is disappointingly minimal. The animation and music (Michael Giacchino!) are wonderful while the screenplay is pedestrian. I really wish this franchise had ended with the third installment, as the fourth was just weird; now we get another really weird installment that at least could be a cute standalone. Unfortunately, Disney clearly has no intention of stopping, and the post-credits scene was enough to elicit an audible groan from my throat during the screening. Hopefully the filmmakers decide to do something a little more brave in the next inevitable installment than this movie's moral of accepting others' help and building the team you need with the people you have.