Let’s imagine a scenario. You are a space ranger on a quest to explore a habitable planet. You, and your crew end up in some trouble and the attempt to retreat from the life-threatening forces on the planet damages your vessel. So, in the interim, the crew builds a (hopefully) temporary colony while working to repair the vessel. You volunteer to test it, flying into space for a brief trip. But your attempt fails. Worse off, when you return you realise the four minutes on your trip in space was actually four years on the past planet. The world has moved on without you. So, what do you decide? Perhaps you decide to make another go at it; you landed them in this mess after all. So, you attempt another trip. This time, more years pass. So, you try again. And you fail again. Before you know it, decades have passed, your closest friend is ageing before your eyes and you have no sense of identity. What kind of psychosocial effects would that have on you? And how would you grapple with your sense of self?
This is, perhaps, an odd question to ask of the newly released Pixar feature “Lightyear,” which follows Buzz Lightyear, first conceived as a toy in Pixar’s “Toy Story” films. The question fees too complex to ask of an animated film, and yet that question (and the avoidance of it) is the very crux of the film’s own set-up. Even as Pixar has dared to explore existential queries in its films, it is still very much a studio that considers its audiences to be primarily children. Yet, within the framework, I found myself confused as to why of all the stories to tell about Buzz Lightyear, screenwriters Jason Headley and Angus MacLane settled on one with so much internal complications. The time-dilation set-up of the film’s opening act is really just a way to get us to the last 2/3 of the film, where Buzz is joined by an obligatory ragtag group of earnest sidekicks to save the world. It’s a set-up that adds an immediately desultory foundation for “Lightyear”, which has no intention of engaging with its conceptualisation, making it seem like despite its long gestation, this film has not been fully realised.
Some years ago on Twitter, Chris Evans – fresh off his stint as Captain America in the MCU – announced he would be voicing Buzz Lightyear, the space-ranger toy from “Toy Story”, in an upcoming Pixar feature. The response was mixed. There was the concern that Pixar had begun to mine its own properties for ideas in a way that felt too focused on commercial output rather than creativity. Then, there was the concern that Tim Allen (a notably pro-Trump Republican) was being cancelled and replaced by Evans (notably anti-Trump and not Republican) in what seemed to be an attempt from Disney/Pixar to be more in line with the zeitgeist. Evans soon clarified that he would not be playing Buzz the toy, but playing the real person that inspired it. The clarification only made things murkier. The opening moments of “Lightyear” attempt something of a clarification again — as “Lightyear” proposes to be the movie that inspired the devotion for the Buzz Light year doll that we saw in “Toy Story.”
In that vein, “Lightyear” is Pixar’s version of a live-action movie. It retains the sensibilities of a live-action film more than the personalised aesthetic of something animated. And it looks sleek and confident. But what would anyone – child or adult –take from this conceptualisation of Buzz to spark engagement or genuine infatuation? For “Lightyear” is consistently, almost aggressively, uninspired. Its approach to its characters is devoid of much energy or anything resembling the cinematic magic one imagines would inspire childhood devotion. Instead, what it offers more than anything, is staid tale of space travel, with a half-hearted “man vs self” conflict (very literally by its end) that feels too schematic to be truly engaging for adults, but also too conceptual to be truly charming for children. It feels like a film stuck on autopilot. All of this might be forgiven if the actual Lightyear figure at the centre of the movie had any sense of elan, or excitement. But if “Lightyear” the film is an exercise in simple dullness, then Lightyear the character is even less engaging.
“Lightyear” opts to avoid any attempt at explaining just why Buzz seems so devoted to completing his mission of returning the colony to earth, even when they seemed to have moved on. In fact, “Lightyear” avoids any explanation of who exactly Buzz is a person. Certainly, the film earns some cache by giving him only minutes to deal with what other characters take years to internalise but the early montage which finds Buzz heading to space and then returning unsuccessfully allows the film to ignore what feels like a logical moment where someone would sit him down and try to understand why success at a mission eclipses a reality where he loses a connection with anyone he knew before. Beyond the way such a scene might offer some grounding for the early sections of the film, it would offer audiences some perspective into who exactly Buzz Lightyear is beyond a prototypical headstrong space ranger. As voiced by Evans, the character has all the personality of a stock action figure. It is not that Evans is bad, but as written the character is devoid of energy or idiosyncrasy and Evans plays him with nary a sense of irony or humour so the very centre of the film comes across as relentlessly humourless. This is hardly awe-inspiring stuff.
The filmmakers decide to “solve” this issue by surrounding him with a group of characters who seem created in a lab with the major ingredient being “quirky”: there is Darby, a surly ageing female ex-convict with a heart of gold; Mo, a clumsy rookie whose major identity trait is cowardice; Sox, a robotic cat who is amusing but vague as a character; and Izzy, an earnest prospective space-ranger with a fear of space (Keke Palmer trying hard with a character that goes nowhere). The last one is especially important. As chance would have it, Izzy is the granddaughter of Buzz’s original partner, Alisha, whose death he missed on one of his missions. By the time Buzz is able to realise the way to fix his mistake, the colony has become overrun with robots, led by a mysterious Emperor Zurg. The clumsy trio of Mo, Darby and Izzy are all Buzz has to save the day. What follows is what you’d expect: Broad jokes, the necessary moments where Buzz threatens to do it alone, an earnest sequence where he learns the power of friendship and a last-minute sequence where every character’s flaw becomes something that helps to save them. What you might not expect is for “Lightyear” to be so devoid of energy that its 100 minutes feel like a chore. Too often I found myself questioning what the purpose of any of this was. What do these characters want? Why do they want it? And why should we be concerned with their desires?
At every turn, “Lightyear” seems to be working from the idea that what happens in the film is important because it tells us so. But in its telling, there is very little attempt at showing, and even less attempt at doing any of this with conviction. Alisha talks about her devotion to Buzz, a man she sees for days in her lifespan of more than seventy years yet we never see anything to understand what she sees in him, or why he is in turn so moved by her memory. It is a film constructed as if from bric-a-brac: a little bit of this and a little bit of that, resulting in a whole lot of mismatched parts that spark banality more excitement. To its credit, Pixar knows how to use its money and the film predictably looks good. Although I’ not very enamoured with the photorealistic approach to animation, it’s clearly what is intended. And so, the sharp perspectives and colour design of space are intriguing and a particular sequence where Izzie realises the magnitude of space is beautiful to watch. But even here I find myself more agnostic then convinced. The visual language is so self-serious, signalling austerity and remoteness, with little in the way of playfulness which makes the half-hearted humorous sequences feel tedious. “Lightyear” is a film in search of a personality. Its artistic commitment is clear and with a US$200M budget, I’d expect no less. But this is not an artistic awareness that feels tied to any earnest engagement with character and place. Things happen because they should and beyond a late revelation (which the film refuses to engage with on any meaningful level, and which feels vaguely reminiscent of the climax of “Up”) very little in “Lightyear” feels like it was created with a sense of detailed consideration about these worlds or these characters. It is, instead, a mechanical marvel. Pixar appears to have joined the industrial approach to filmmaking. To infinity and…beyond?
