Lightyear is the first Pixar film to open in cinemas since Onward in March 2020 which had its cinema release scuttled by the onset of the dark times-sorry-The Pandemic and this film is about the actual character of Buzz Lightyear and not the toy from the Toy Story films and this time Chris Evans voices Buzz instead of Tim Allen, the story here sees Buzz attempt to save his marooned crew on a remote planet by attempting to use lightspeed as a fast means to get them home but after one trip he finds the planet near deserted save for a small group of space rangers who want to take down the Zerg ship keeping them from leaving the planet.
Lightyear is sadly a big disappointment for me but before I delve into why I feel that way I want to touch on the positives I have with this movie and firstly the film has some nice animation visuals in it, Pixar normally delivers good quality visuals and here is no exception be it the remote planet, the details in the space ranger uniforms, the sparseness of the living modules the crew live in on their colony and even the food meals.
Also I love the character of Sox the Cat, he’s voiced by Peter Cohn and he is a lot of fun to watch and often steals many of the scenes he’s in from his observations to his practicality to his very cute face that made me think of my own furry Kitty critic when he was on screen.
But despite those positives I was very disappointed in this movie overall:
- The first reason is the story itself, it did very little for me in terms of an emotional response either happy or sad and given that this is a Pixar film I had hoped for something either exciting like the opening of Toy Story 2 or something sad like Toy Story 3 but instead it does this weird story that made me wonder who this movie is for.
Because I got to thinking the more I let this movie sift around in my head since seeing it was that I wasn’t sure whether a lot of kids would get with it and enjoy it nor was I 100% sure that most adults would enjoy it either.
And this leads me into my second problem which is the heroes themselves, I honestly didn’t really care about them very much as the movie has a bad habit of treating them as either buffoons or too wet behind the ears and its one thing to laugh WITH your heroes in a movie like this but this movie has you laughing AT them and not in a good way especially the character that Taika Waititi voices now I am a big Taika fan but here he was too cartoonish and silly for my liking.
- And lastly I was disappointed in Chris Evans as Buzz, now when he was announced as voicing this role instead of Tim Allen in this movie I was interested to see what he would do with this character given how good and successful he was as Captain America in the MCU but alas he does not get to play a noble and heroic Buzz instead he plays a maudlin and somber Buzz and it really hurts this movie in a big way at least for me and when he does repeat Tim Allen’s lines from the Toy Story films it too often feels like he is imitating Allen instead of doing his own thing.
And so that was Lightyear and this movie as well as Jurassic World Dominion aren’t really helped by opening so soon after Top Gun Maverick which for me did deliver a rollicking good time at the cinema whereas here it feels too maudlin and somber for kids and for the adults in the audience but it has some nice visuals and a cool movie Cat so I’ll give it a regrettable 2 out of 5.
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