Review: Chris Evans' Buzz is more fantastic than plastic in Pixar's spiffy 'Lightyear'
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Instead of going to infinity and beyond, Pixarâs âLightyearâ has a more modest goal: to do something interesting and fun with an animated classic without doing âToy Story 5.â
Directed and co-written by former animator Angus MacLane, the spiffy space adventure (â â â out of four; rated PG; now streaming on Disney+) mostly works as an origin story for earnest space ranger Buzz Lightyear â the role originated by Tim Allen in 1995'sâToy Storyâ and voiced here (as a cartoon human and not a plastic dude) by Chris Evans. The erstwhile Captain America is a solid choice to headline whatâs mainly a straightforward sci-fi action story bookended by a pair of existential crises that actually make this spinoff fly.
The opening title card explains what weâre dealing with here: âLightyearâ essentially is the movie that Andy, the boy from âToy Story,â became obsessed with in â95 and spawned the Buzz toy that Andy famously received for his birthday (and irked Woody mightily back in the day). So itâs Pixar's meta version of âStar Warsâ but with more high jinks and pesky alien vines.
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The "real" Buzz is a spaceman who doesnât like autopilots, rookies, or failing his duties. A mission into space to find an inhabitable planet and set up shop goes awry, and Buzz, his best friend/commander Alisha (Uzo Aduba) and their passengers become marooned on a hostile world 4.2 million light-years from Earth. Blaming himself, Buzz goes to extremes to fix this mistake and embarks on test flights to perfect a hyperspeed crystal that will help get everyone off this rock. But every trip, which takes him about four minutes, equals four years and two months for everyone else he knows, thanks to "time dilation," leading to life passing him by over several decades.
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Alongside his movie-stealing robot cat companion Sox (Peter Sohn), Buzz finally does succeed in crafting a crystal that works but, upon his return to his temporary intergalactic home, finds the space colony overtaken by a robot army led by the evil Zurg (James Brolin). To combat this Darth Vader-y menace, Buzz teams with Alishaâs granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer) and her motley crew of cadets, who are nowhere near ranger-ready.
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âLightyearâ gives new meaning to Buzzâs âTo infinity and beyondâ catchphrase and adds in some easter eggs thatâll make old fans smile but doesnât go overboard with the âToy Storyâ connections. It instead embraces a more cosmic âBad News Bearsâ vibe as an exasperated Buzz wants to do everything himself and is forced to learn the importance of a crew whoâs got your back. Composer Michael Giacchinoâs score harks back to â70s and â80s sci-fi TV themes, the animation is downright phenomenal at times, Sox is totally the new Baby Yoda, and the narrative mines a lot of comedy at the expense of the overly serious Buzz.
As a cohesive whole, there are rough patches: âLightyearâ overall feels like a series of cobbled-together episodes that donât always flow smoothly. And Buzzâs bits with his new crop of rangers â including flighty Mo (Taika Waititi) and weirdly old Darby (Dale Soules) â are sufficiently entertaining although they feel slight here. It starts as an introspective Pixar movie, then throws in a bunch of generic sci-fi adventures before remembering it's a Pixar movie again by the end.
Buzzâs friendship with Alisha, a caring queer character who starts a family and makes the most of a bad situation while her pal obsessively attempts to be a hero, gives âLightyearâ that piece of signature Pixar emotionality amid the cosmic derring-do. While Disneyâs vaunted animation studio tries to have its astronaut ice cream and eat it, too â with a âToy Storyâ movie thatâs really trying not to be a âToy Storyâ movie â there is that certain spark missing that you only find in its original fare like, say, âTurning Red.â
âLightyearâ is a crowd-pleasing effort that doesnât shoot for the moon but manages to be a nostalgic blast anyway.