Directed by: Angus MacLane
Voices of: Chris Evans, Keke Palmer, Peter Sohn, Taika Waititi, Uzo Aduba, James Brolin, Efren Ramirez, Jr.
I was confused at first upon seeing Lightyear's trailers. How would a toy have a backstory? Buzz Lightyear is a toy. Lightyear clears this up in the prologue when it describes the movie as the one Andy saw back in 1995 which made him want the Buzz Lightyear doll. Now that this issue was resolved, I was ready for dive into Lightyear for some fun. Not so fast...
Lightyear is an animated feature with a pall hanging over it from which it never shakes loose. Buzz (Evans) lands on a desolate planet and investigates the terrain before allowing his crew to leave the ship. The planet's environment is hostile, so Buzz attempts to leave the planet. Alas, he clips the ship on a jagged piece of a mountain during his ascent, damaging the crystal which would allow the ship to achieve hyperspeed. Determined to make up for his mistake, Buzz attempts a mission to regain hyperspeed once the crystal is repaired in which he must whip around the sun and accelerate. However, in a clever sequence which shows the movie understands Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Buzz's mission takes only four minutes, but the people on the planet have aged four years. Buzz' sidekick Alisha Hawthorne (Aduba) has since met her future wife and has gotten pregnant.
Buzz fails in his mission, but each time he attempts it, four more years tick off on the planet below. In a tearjerker sequence, we see how Buzz has missed Hawthorne's wedding, the birth of her child, anniversaries, birthdays, and everything else he would normally share with his best friend. Because Buzz is unable to reconcile that he made a mistake and is trying to correct it, he misses out on his best friend's life. It wouldn't be Pixar and Disney without plugging in at least one sad montage from which the movie can't recover. Lightyear, even with all of its plot twists involving the evil Zurgs (led by Emperor Zurg voiced by James Brolin), who has a connection to Buzz, and loud action, is never fully compelling.
Buzz, unlike the previous four Toy Story movies, is not voiced by Tim Allen. Chris Evans' voicing of the no-nonsense title character is close enough to Allen's so we are not distracted by the fact that it isn't Allen. Others may disagree. I've read online comments that not casting Allen as Buzz Lightyear's voice is heresy. The voices are hardly the reason why Lightyear doesn't quite lift off to infinity and beyond.
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