Lightyear
Originally released June 17, 2022
When this movie released, literally all I had heard of it was that conservatives were pissed off about two women kissing. It seems like it came and went and was quickly forgotten, which is kind of unfortunate, because... well, I liked it. Mostly, anyway.
Some opening lines establish that this movie is the movie that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy from the Toy Story franchise, a revelation that gives Deadpool a nosebleed. Buzz himself is on a scouting mission on a new planet with his commanding officer Alisha Hawthorne and rookie Featheringtonhamsonhamtonson, and it turns out that the planet is filled with hostile bugs and vines that try to kill everyone. This disables their ship "The Turnip" and strands them for a year while they try to repair it and develop a new fuel crystal. Buzz takes a test flight that fails, and finds out that due to time dilation (which a planet full of
actual space scientists
failed to account for) four years have passed.
He's assigned a therapy robot cat named Sox to help him adjust to the loss of time, and Sox is amazing and I want one. Despite Alisha's protests, Buzz continues to take test flight after test flight, jumping farther and farther in time while everyone he knows ages and dies around him. Eventually he makes it far enough that Alisha has died and is replaced with a new CO, who wants to shut down the "go home" mission and instead focus on defenses for the new home they've built. Security tries to confiscate Sox, who has figured out a stable fuel formula, and Buzz escapes with him and steals a ship to take a successful hyperspeed jump. He arrives another 22 years in the future and meets Izzy, Alisha's granddaughter, and is told that evil robots from space (under the command of Zurg) are attacking the planet.
Alisha brings Buzz to meet her crack team of incompetent, unqualified idiots, and they set out to destroy Zurg's ship while Buzz repeatedly tries and fails to ditch them. After they steal a part from an abandoned mining station, Izzy fucks up their escape and Zurg's robots capture both the fuel crystal and Buzz himself. On the ship, Buzz learns that Zurg is actually an older version of himself created as a time dilation clone that traveled back in time or some stupid bullshit, and he wants to travel farther back to stop the Turnip from being stranded in the first place. Buzz realizes this means Alisha would never find her wife and that a lot of people, including Izzy, would never exist and decides not to work with him, so Zurg ties him up until an older version of Sox breaks him free.
At about this time, Izzy and the other members of the squad use one of the robots' teleportation mines to travel to Zurg's ship, and set out to save Buzz. Izzy makes it to him in time for them to grab the fuel cell and set off the self-destruct, and they barely get off the ship in time. Buzz detonates the fuel crystal and blows Zurg up in space, and they crash-land on the planet and are rescued. The new CO offers Buzz a chance to train a new squad of Space Rangers, and Buzz decides to train Izzy and the others. The End.
This movie starts out
strong
, a really good piece of action sci-fi. The beginning where Buzz jumps forward through his life and all his friends and co-space-people are aging and dying around him is actually a little emotional, and shows what he's giving up for their sake as they all get married and raise families and actually live their lives. I also like the characters involved in the movie, including Sox, who's just the fucking best and consistently hilarious.
But sadly, towards the end it kind of falls apart. Zurg's reveal as Old Buzz just felt a little dumb and overdone; for a while I thought he would be Featherhamsontonman (but I'm really glad he wasn't, since that would have just been a direct repeat of Syndrome from The Incredibles), but there would have been absolutely nothing wrong if he was just a space robot attacking the colony. There was even a bit of dialogue where Old Buzz didn't know who Izzy was, despite her being "introduced" to Buzz before his final, successful mission, so I was thinking that it was a trick of some kind and another rubber mask was about to come off. But nah, this wasn't the case. Time travel makes everything dumber.
I also have a theory that I want to put out there. The movie suggests that it's a simple case of a time dilation duplicate traveling back in time, but I actually suspect that during the final mission, Buzz jumped timelines. There's a scene towards the middle where Buzz and the crew of rookies are having some sandwiches that are built backwards (meat on the outside, bread on the inside), and while Buzz says that they're strange, everyone acts like they're built completely normally. There's a suggestion that at some point, they just started making sandwiches that way because the other way around wasn't as good, but this could have also been a subtle clue that Buzz isn't in Kansas anymore. The elderly convict on the team definitely would have remembered the bread-on-the-outside sandwiches, but she didn't seem to.
I don't want this to get too long, but there were also a few recurring plot threads that went nowhere at all. One of the broken Zurg-bots stalks them through the movie only to get unceremoniously shot and destroyed. Mo obsesses over having a pen in his suit and all it's used for is to unjam a hatch that didn't need to be jammed in the first place. Mo and Darby set up a bomb to shut the door and protect their ship from Zurg's robots, but they never reach the door anyway and they get the door shut two seconds before the entire mothership blows up, so that was all busywork. Just all kinds of little things like this that amount to nothing and end in unsatisfying ways.
Also, there was a real missed opportunity to do this movie in live-action to make it feel more different from Toy Story. Ah well. It was still a decent bit of sci-fi, but fell apart towards the end with the time travel angle and the little things that went nowhere. I still didn't hate it, though, it was pretty fun and enjoyable and it had Sox, who
really
needs a break after carrying so much of the movie's second half on his fucking back.
Final Score: 7/10