If you’ve seen Toy Story, or any of its sequels, you know who Buzz Lightyear is. In the original film, the vainglorious astronaut action figure is the new toy that replaces Tom Hanks’ Sheriff Woody as Andy’s favorite. Voiced by Tim Allen, he’s one of the great sidekicks in movie history, and he’s already had a direct-to-video spinoff movie and a short-lived animated series.
Lightyear, Pixar’s latest animated opus, opens with a note of explanation: This is the film that Andy saw in 1995 that made him want a Buzz Lightyear action figure. It’s a particularly tricky way to reboot a character, now voiced by former Captain America Chris Evans. But it does have the advantage of creating a blank slate upon which Pixar’s army of animators can draw a whole new animated space adventure.
Lightyear opens with a huge spherical spaceship, colloquially known as The Turnip, hurtling through deep space. When the automated systems discover a potentially habitable planet, Buzz is awakened from hypersleep to check it out. He and his partner Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) scout the new territory to see if it’s worth waking up the rest of the colony ship, and soon find that the local life is angry and numerous. Their escape goes bad, and Buzz crashes the ship. In the process, the refined crystalline fuel that powers the ship’s faster than light drive is exhausted, stranding 1,200 passengers and crew on a hostile planet.
But Space Rangers are nothing if not resourceful, and the newly awakened crew settles in to create their own fuel from local resources. It’s not easy, and it’s made worse by the fact that they have to build a new ship for each new batch, because Buzz’s test flights tend to end destructively. Even worse, because of Relativistic time dilation, when Buzz flies at speeds near c, four minutes is four years to those left behind. He watches his friends and crew mates grow old, while he barely ages. Meanwhile, the colony is flourishing. Everyone else is leading a fruitful, reasonably happy life except Buzz, who is obsessed with completing a mission that began decades ago. To help cope, he is issued a robot cat named Sox (voiced by Pixar veteran Peter Sohn).
Finally, after returning from an almost successful test flight, he finds his friend and commanding officer Hawthorne has died of old age. The new commander is shutting down the test program, just as Sox announces that he has, after 62 years of work, finally found the right formula for hyperspace fuel. Buzz (who presumably has seen Top Gun: Maverick) steals the final test ship and sets off to prove he can finish the mission and rescue the colony that no longer seems to want or need rescuing.
The flight is successful, but the superluminal speed Buzz achieves also means his time dilation problem is much worse. He returns to a far future world where the colony is hiding from an invasion of alien robots under the command of Emperor Zurg (James Brolin). Buzz must rally a ragtag group of human allies, led by Hawthorne’s granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer) to destroy Zurg’s advanced spaceship and save the colony.
For a movie purposefully backdated to 1995, Lightyear draws on surprisingly contemporary sources: The time dilation situation from Interstellar, and a Gravity-esque vacuum crossing, being only two of them. (If ir had really been made in 1995, there would have had a lot more Star Wars references.) Writer/director Angus MacLane, who previously co-helmed Finding Dory, translates these grown-up movies for his younger target audience. As you can tell from my summary of the first act, the plotting is unusually dense — although it does stretch out a bit for big action sequences once Zurg arrives planet-side.
It probably goes without saying that Lightyear looks amazing, but I’m going to say it anyway. The film’s biggest asset is Chris Evans, who grasps both Buzz’s arrogance and endearing earnestness.
Lightyear does not have the emotional depth of Pixar classics like Toy Story or Up, so you could say it’s a lesser product of the storied studio. But I’m a big believer in judging a film on how well it accomplishes what it’s trying to do. Lightyear aspires to be nothing more than a fun space adventure, and that’s a mission MacLane and Pixar easily accomplish.