Operation Mincemeat

Year 14, Day 239 - 8/27/22 - Movie #4,232

BEFORE: Penelope Wilton carries over from "Zoo" - there was another film about World War II I could have included in this chain, also with Penelope Wilton, called "Summerland" - I've decided to cut it from the schedule for now, because I've got too many films, if I can cut "Summerland" and one more, I can fit in a second Christmas movie in December, so that's the plan.  Fortunately "Summerland" has plenty of connections to other films on my list, so there's a good chance I can re-schedule it in the future - I'll try for next year.  I seem to also have a knack for cutting the right film at times, very often the films I cut become crucial links somewhere on down the line, but I guess any film has the potential to be a crucial link down the line, it just depends on what else happens to be on the watchlist at any given time. 

I know, it's hard to believe, but I'm thinking about Christmas - it's only 120 days away, after all, which is just about four months, or for me, 68 movies away, if I've planned this right.  (Halloween is 43 movies away and Thanksgiving is 57 movies away.)

THE PLOT: During World War II, two intelligence officers use a corpse and false papers to outwit German troops. 

AFTER: I'm going to be honest here, sometimes it takes me two or three tries to get a movie watched - and this one took two tries.  Maybe I was still recovering from going to work at 5 am on Thursday, or maybe it was the two beers and zero caffeine I had on Friday night, which made it VERY easy to fall asleep during this movie.  Or, maybe it's the movie's fault, who can say?  There are some long, boring bits in this movie, and when a movie is focused on World War II and a intelligence operation set during that war, it shouldn't be boring, not in the slightest.  But maybe there WERE boring bits in World War II, how would I know?  I wasn't there.  But we, the audience, kind of expect a spy film, fiction or non-fiction, to hold our attention, don't we?  

I think the fatal mistake here is that the film spends so much time on the PLANNING of the operation, and that's just not why we tuned in.  We want to see the action, the heist, the last-minute escape from the enemy, the shoot-outs and the explosions, and there's just nothing like that to be found in this movie, not in the slightest.  The tensest action comes in the base of the Allied operatives, when they're waiting for news regarding the success of the invasion of Sicily to come in, over the telex.  That's not exactly thrilling suspenseful stuff - why would I want to watch a film about spies that are essentially waiting for a phone call?

To be fair, there's about thirty seconds of footage devoted to the invasion of Sicily by Allied forces, but the other 99% of the movie is either planning the operation, or waiting to hear if the operation went well.  Yawn, wake me up when the shooting starts, please.  Now, maybe this is the exact way that things went down, but if so, that doesn't make for a thrilling, grab-you-by-the-eyeballs sort of film, it's more of a thinkpiece, if you could compare the action here to a sport, it would totally be chess, which is not really a great spectator sport.  Sure, poker also is a big mental game, and features opponents trying to outwit each other, but at least poker has movement, betting, raising, folding.  Chess just has two people moving pieces around on a board and doesn't really heat up until the end.  This film is the equivalent of chess, not poker.  

It's true that Sicily was invaded by the Allies and they were met with little resistance - because of the deception involved, in making the Nazis think that they were going to try to get a foothold in Greece, not Sicily.  And how did they do that?  They falsified some papers, correspondence from one general to another, and planted that in a briefcase of a fake pilot, only they dressed up a corpse and made it look like he drowned after his plane crashed.  By letting this corpse wash ashore on the coast of Spain, the Allied hoped that whoever discovered the body would turn it over to the authorities, and when German agents heard about it, they'd investigate, find the contents of the briefcase, and pass the intelligence intercepted up the chain, all the way to Hitler himself.  And because they found this information by accident, they'd assume it was true, unlike information they'd acquired by surveillance, which could always be faked - the trick came in making appear as if the Nazis found the letters unintentionally, when it was in fact very intentional.  

They threw in a love triangle here, which I assume means that some scriptwriter realized how dry and boring this story really was, and what better way to infuse some drama into the lives of these agents than by adding a little romance?  So God only knows if this part of the story was true, but among the agents working to craft a believable identity for this fake pilot corpse were a married man whose wife had settled in America for the duration of the war, a widowed secretary and a shy single man.  In a more perfect world the shy single man might be able to express his feelings for the widowed secretary, and the widowed secretary might be more attracted to the single man, and also the married man might not develop romantic feelings for the widowed secretary, but clearly it's not a perfect world, it never is. I saw a variation on the same sort of thing back in February in "Their Finest", it's clear that not only is war hell, but it's hell on relationships - some couples got split up by men dying in the war, some didn't survive the separation, and others just sort of dissolved away because everybody was too on edge about being bombed to even think about romance. Does that make sense?  Priorities, I guess. 

Look, it could have been a lot worse - after reading the plotline I was dreading some kind of 1940's take on "Weekend at Bernie's".  Two intelligence officers use a corpse to outwit German troops -  you can see there's an awful comedy in there somewhere, right? 

Instead, this is all about the Allies trying to figure out what the Nazis are going to do, based on the information they planted - and also wondering if there was really a faction within the German army that was trying to depose or kill Hitler, or if that was itself a deception or a trick. Really, though, Germans are way too serious to pull pranks, trust me on this point.  Brits usually are too, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  But there are situations shown here that call to mind that scene from "The Princess Bride" where the Sicilian is trying to figure out which goblet holds the poison in it - would his opponent put the poisoned goblet closest to himself, or further away?  Would the Germans believe the information they found, or would they tend to NOT believe it, simply because they found it?  Did they find it because the Allies wanted them to find it, and if so, should they act on the information they found, or do the opposite?  And if they choose to ignore it, would they regret it later - so should they act on it, even if they don't really believe it?  God, if this what intelligence operations involve, count me out.  

The film doesn't talk about what happened a year later, when the Allies were planning to invade Holland, and a British officer left a bunch of maps and plans for the operation on a glider that he flew in - the Germans found the plans in the glider, but because of Operation Mincemeat, they were convinced it was another set of false documents planted by the British, and they treated them as such, and thus weren't prepared for that invasion, either.  Silly Germans. 

The credit for this operation is often given to Ian Fleming, who was serving in British Naval intelligence during the war, and appears here as a character.  Fleming, of course, went on to write James Bond novels, and an officer in this film complains that he's surrounded by aspiring writers, which is even worse than being surrounded by Nazis.  And this real-life Operation Mincemeat also served as the inspiration for Hitchcock's film "North by Northwest". 

Also starring Colin Firth (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"), Kelly Macdonald (ditto), Matthew Macfadyen (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Johnny Flynn (last seen in "The Dig"), Jason Isaacs (last heard in "Scoob!"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Hattie Morahan (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Mark Bonnar (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Paul Ritter (last seen in "Their Finest"), Ellie Haddington (ditto), Alex Jennings (last seen in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"), Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), James Fleet (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Nicholas Rowe (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Will Keen (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Charlotte Hamblin, Lorne MacFadyen (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Rufus Wright (last seen in "45 Years"), Jonjo O'Neill (last seen in "Defiance"), Markus von Lingen (ditto), Ruby Bentall (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Alexander Beyer (last seen in "The Fifth Estate"), Nico Birnbaum, Pep Tosar, Caspar Jennings, Dolly Gadsdon (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Michael Bott (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Paul Lancaster, Simon Rouse, Amy Marston (also last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Gabrielle Creevy, Javier Godino, Pedro Casablanc, Laura Morgan, Alba Brunet, Oscar Zafra with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Gathering Storm")

RATING: 5 out of 10 cheeses paired with Spam

Zoo

Year 14, Day 236 - 8/24/22 - Movie #4,231

BEFORE: I was going to space things out a bit more, not watch another movie until Friday, but then I realized I'm working tomorrow starting at 5 am, a 12-hour shift, so I think I'm going to be very exhausted on Thursday night, too tired to watch a movie.  So, let me get it out of the way now, then I can watch another movie Friday night, which will count for Saturday. I'm still on track, I've got extra days to spare right now, so no worries, we'll be on Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas movies soon enough.  Just have to kill a little time here and there until then - but also, I should take the time to enjoy fall when it gets here, there's no need to rush things.  I'll be busy with working staff meetings and student orientation sessions, plus an art sale, plus New York Comic-Con, so, really, my life's about to get very crazy and I should try to enjoy the down-time when I do get it. 

Toby Jones carries over from "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain". 

THE PLOT: Young Tom Hall and his misfit friends fight to save Buster the baby elephant during the German air raid bombings of Northern Ireland in 1941.

AFTER: Well, I thought I was done with movies about World War II, but it turns out they're not done with me.  I burned this to a DVD with "The Zookeeper's Wife", another World War II film set at a zoo, but they are VERY different movies.  One's a complex drama about the German occupation and hiding Jewish people in a Polish zoo, and this one's more of a tween comedy about saving an elephant.  To each his own, I guess. But is there a market for two "World War Zoo" films?  Maybe not, because this 2017 film barely charted at the box office, grossing only $231,000 worldwide. Did people not want to see a feel-good comedy about the bombing of Belfast? 

Oh, geez, I guess it's kind of animal appreciation week around here, if you count the robot cat from "Lightyear", then Louis Wain's cats yesterday.  I've got another World War II film set to close out the week, but I'm not sure there are any animals in it, so trend over, that was quick. This is supposedly a true story about the fact that the Belfast Zoo reacted to the Nazi bombings of their city by killing all the dangerous animals.  The theory was that if the zoo should get bombed, any break in the walls or fences would release dangerous animals on to the streets of Belfast, and then they've got another problem, with lions or wolves roaming the city.  Yeah, but did they have to KILL them?  The animals did nothing wrong, they just want to live their lives and eat their food and it wasn't even their war, it was ours, so it was a really shitty thing to do.  Find another solution, same goes for that walrus they killed up in Norway just because it was sitting on people's boats and sinking them.  Drug it, move it, release it into the wild, just try to be more humane instead of just being human.  Damn the governments who look for the quickest, easiest solution, which is not always the best one. 

In this story, the teen son of a zookeeper (who was sent off to fight in the war) takes it upon himself to steal the elephant from the zoo, once he realizes that the soldiers are killing the most dangerous animals - you know, to protect them from the bombing.  There you go, kill them so they don't get hurt, that makes sense.  To do this, he and his very mopey non-girlfriend need to recruit one of their school's bullies over to their side, because they need a strong kid who can open a back gate.  That bully turns out to not be such a bad kid, he's got a younger brother with a genetic condition, who for some reason needs to tag along on every zoo-related mission, how very PC.  And the zoo employee who works the main gate turns out to not be such a bad guy, he even helps the kids when he realizes they're trying to save the elephant's life.  

The problem then becomes not how do you steal an elephant, but where can you HIDE an elephant?  The trio of teens befriends an older woman with a menagerie of her own - rabbits, hedgehogs and a bunch of birds - because who's going to notice one more creature in her house, if nobody ever visits her?  If you want to hide a book, find a library, I always say.  Of course, this whole mission is just really a distraction so that young Tom doesn't have to deal with his father being away at war, or thinking that he may not return, or that they'll all be killed by German bombs one of these nights.  Umm, yeah we may lose a character in this film, but I guess that's why they didn't give that character much of a personality, so we won't mourn as much. 

Other than that, this feels a bit like it could have been a Disney movie - or would that have made it even cornier and hokier?  Maybe it's for the best that this wasn't made by Disney, it's still got that indie sort of feel to it - but it also feels like it WANTS to be a Disney movie. Whether that's good or bad, I suppose that depends on how you feel about Disney movies. 

Also starring Art Parkinson (last seen in "San Andreas"), Penelope Wilton (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Ian O'Reilly, Ian McElhinney (last seen in "City of Ember"), Amy Huberman, Damian O'Hare (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"), Stephen Hagan (last seen in "Risen"), James Stockdale, Emily Flain, Geraldine McAlinden, Frank Cannon, Shane McCaffrey, Pauline Hutton, Donncha Crowley (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Glen Nee, Cecilia Ward, Gary Huston. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 hungry penguins

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

Year 14, Day 235 - 8/23/22 - Movie #4,230

BEFORE: Still spacing out my August movies, which I'm hoping is the right move. I didn't want to speed through this chain of movies that's connecting my documentary block with the start of the annual ShockTober horror fest, because then I'd be left with two or three weeks in September with no movies to watch.  But at the same time, I've been on furlough from one of my jobs while they conduct roof repairs on the theater - so, how to fill the empty time?  Well, I've managed to catch up on some TV shows.  Binging, as the kids say - I cleared the second season of "Tiger King" off my Netflix list, also something called "This Is a Robbery", which was about the still-unsolved 1990 theft from an art museum in Boston.  I cleared both "Moon Knight" and "Obi-Wan Kenobi" from my Disney+ watchlist and started on "She-Hulk" - but I still have "Ms. Marvel" and "What If..." to go. I'm almost through a few months' worth of "Bar Rescue" and "Restaurant Impossible", but 60 episodes of "Chopped" are taking up space on my DVR. 

Oh, yeah, and then there was Season 4 of "Stranger Things", that was a big deal - very scary, and I was watching it late at night, too,  so good luck sleeping, right?  And then I made it almost all the way through the latest season of "What We Do in the Shadows", which is produced by Taika Waititi, who carries over from "Lightyear" to tonight's film.  Most recently on Sunday night I watched the first four episodes of "The Sandman", which seems to be an adaptation of the first story-arc of the famous comic book, and one actor from THAT show is in today's movie.  My TV shows don't HAVE to connect to my movies, but it's a bit more interesting when they do. 

I'm back to work at the second job today, so I'm going to be very busy for the next two weeks - but I should be able to schedule four more films into August, and then I can block out September, which I think can hold 21 or 22 films if I space them out right. 

THE PLOT: English artist Louis Wain rises to prominence at the end of the 19th century for his surreal cat paintings that seemed to reflect his declining sanity. 

AFTER: Well, it's kind of the Year of the Cumberbatch, isn't it?  I mean, he's not going to catch up with Bruce Willis and Nic Cage, but he's been featured prominently in my 14th Movie Year - he was in two big Marvel movies, two spy movies, an Oscar-nominated modern Western, and a little TV movie called "Stuart: A Life Backwards" that I'm still trying to figure out.  So you may be wondering, why not put all the Benedict Cumberbatch movies together, watch them all at once, why split them up like this?  Ah, the chain kind of has a mind of its own sometimes, and over time I've learned to respect this. I came very close to watching this one along with "The Courier" and "The Mauritanian", but at that time I was also trying to figure out how I was going to connect the end of the doc chain with the start of the horror chain, and after playing around with some possible paths, I realized that I needed to split this one away from the herd in order to make an important linking connection.  Sure, maybe I could have gotten where I needed to by another route, but this one seemed like the most efficient, and there's no rule that I HAVE to watch all the films with one actor together, I can move them around as I see fit - plus I had too many films in the chain anyway, if I was going to make it to my July 4 film on time the way I wanted to.  Now I'm kind of in the same boat, I've got ONE too many films to make it to Christmas, so I need to cut one off the list between now and then, and there are THREE likely candidates, I just have to think about which one I can most likely work into next year's chain, even if there's no accurate way to predict that yet. 

Anyway, I'm glad this film helped me make my connection today, but I'm not quite sure WHY this film exists - Louis Wain was a real artist who illustrated cats and those drawings seemed to strike a chord with people back in Victorian England, but so what?  In the grand scheme of things, who really cares about this?  I know a ton of illustrators working today, people who struggle to get their cartoons into The New Yorker every month, and I wish them well, but how is that helping society out, beyond entertaining people for a few seconds here and there?  I'd rather watch a film about a scientist who found a cure for something, or a doctor who saved people's lives with a new operating technique, or somebody who brokered peace and ended a war or something - doesn't that all sound more important than drawing cats?  

Besides, according to this, Wain only took the illustration job so his sisters would hire a governess that he fancied - again, great, I'm happy somebody found the love of his life in an unlikely place, and damn all those people who were shocked - SHOCKED - that someone from the upper middle class should want to marry someone from the lower middle class.  They can all go screw themselves, because love is where you find it, even if there's some kind of real or imagined imbalance involved in it.  All you had to do to create a "scandal" in Victorian London was sneeze, anyway, or forget to say "Bless you" when someone else sneezed.  What was so great about this time period, anyway?  Oh, right, something about electricity, or industry, some kind of revolution...which led to poisoning the planet, and we're still feeling the effects of that, so thanks for using all that coal, kerosene and whale oil, Victorians!  

Louis was the only member of the family with a job, after failed attempts at creating operas and patenting inventions that didn't work, his illustrations supported his five sisters.  And why couldn't any of them work for a living?  Oh, right, women just didn't do that, give me a break. If you need money, you go GET A JOB, it's as simple as that - any of these five women could have learned to be a clerk, or a factory manager, or worked in child care or nursing, who cares if it didn't look "proper", get over yourselves, a job would have put food on the table.  None of them could manage to get married, either, gee, I wonder why, could it be their savage or overly quirky personalities?  Again, get over yourselves, get a job or a husband and stop being a leech. Pride and social standing be damned, what about gaining self-respect for earning an income?  

Louis, despite all his eccentricities, marries Emily and they ignore the cries of scandal, and they're happy together, for a time.  They take to raising stray cats, which I fully support - though this was apparently unusual in the Victorian era, I guess people kept dogs in their manors for hunting and companionship, and cats were only good for catching mice.  But after Emily died from breast cancer, Louis threw himself into the work of cat illustrations, and despite an incredible amount of wrong information about cats being bandied about, slowly it became fashionable to keep cats as pets.  Before this, cats and dogs didn't really fight in the real world, that's only in cartoons, but when it came time to compete for the affections of humans, oh, well, then the battle was ON.  

Wain's illustrations appeared in the newspaper (mews-paper?) and on postcards, greeting cards - he was like the B. Kliban of his day, if you're of a certain age, you may know who that was.  But Wain neglected to file for copyrights of his work, so he couldn't profit from any reproductions of his work, and he found it harder to profit from his drawings, essentially he was competing with himself.  Meanwhile one sister got committed to an insane asylum, and the whole family got evicted from their home - again, I blame the other sisters who simply would not get out there and look for jobs. After his favorite cat died, Wain's own mental health started to decline, so he headed for New York, where I guess all the crazy people end up, sooner or later.  But days after he arrived, he got word that his mother died from influenza, so he soon returned to England. 

His newspaper editor, who was putting up the whole Wain family in his summer home, so the family gets evicted AGAIN, but moves to a small London flat at the start of World War I.  Wain falls off a bus and goes into a coma, during which he claimed to have time-traveled and visited the year 1991 - and when he wakes up, he designs a bunch of futuristic cat-themed toys, I guess they look like robots or Hello Kittys or something, and it finally looks like he might turn a profit from this cat thing, but the whole boatload of toys gets sunk by a German U-boat.  Yep, that seems about right.  

Wain has greater mental breakdowns after the deaths of his mother, cat and a few more sisters, and is committed to a mental hospital, in the pauper's ward.  An official inspecting the mental institution recognizes him, and starts a campaign, with the three remaining sisters, to raise money to put him in a better home, where he can have a pet cat.  This was like the original GoFundMe campaign, perhaps - thousands of his fans contributed, and H.G. Wells assisted with the fund-raising drive, placing him in better institutions in Southwark and later St. Albans.  I can't really say that's a happy ending, because honestly, this is a reminder that there's no such thing, but I guess it's a better one?  

Wain was fascinated by electricity, as maybe many people were back then - but did he understand it?  It feels like he used it for anything, any scientific process or even a feeling or an emotion that he didn't understand.  Our bodies have static electricity, of course, but it's not what keeps up alive, right?  And he thought that when a cat has stripes, it's because one of its ancestors was once struck by lightning, which is just flat-out ridiculous.  He also posited that cats were in the process of evolving, and in a few generations they'd be walking on two legs and talking to their human masters in English.  Yeah, this guy had more than a few screws loose - you can't just make up fantasy things and then call that science, you can have a hypothesis about that, but then things need to be tested with the scientific method before then can be taken seriously. 

So I'm left kind of scratching my head about the why of it all - this film isn't funny enough to be considered a comedy, it's more of a drama but at the same time too overly melancholy, and as for the historical aspect, this weird artist really shouldn't be seen as more of a footnote to history.  I mean, I guess if you love cats, you can thank this guy for making them popular and fashionable, but really, that's about it. 

Also starring Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "The Courier"), Claire Foy (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Toby Jones (last seen in "City of Ember"), Sharon Rooney (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Aimee Lou Wood, Hayley Squires, Stacy Martin (last seen in "Tale of Tales"), Phoebe Nicholls (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Adeel Akhtar (last seen in "Victoria & Abdul"), Asim Chaudhry (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Crystal Clarke (last seen in "Assassin's Creed"), Daniel Rigby (last seen in "Flyboys"), Richard Ayoade (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Julian Barratt (last seen in "The Reckoning"), Dorothy Atkinson (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Nick Cave (last seen in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"), Fehinti Balogun, Jamie Demetriou (last seen in "Cruella"), Sophia Di Martino (last seen in "Yesterday"), Siobhan McSweeney (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Stewart Scudamore (last seen in "Dolittle"), Simon Munnery, Olivier Richters (last seen in "The King's Man"), Jimmy Winch, Cassia McCarthy, Anya McKenna-Bruce, Indica Watson and the voice of Olivia Colman (last seen in "The Father"), 

RATING: 4 out of 10 National Cat Club meetings

Lightyear

Year 14, Day 233 - 8/21/22 - Movie #4,229

BEFORE: This is another film that played at the theater where I work part-time - but I didn't get to watch it, because I was working the screening.  I had to hand out the 3-D glasses and then sit in the office, just in case there was any security issue or any problem with the screening or the guests. I did my job and passed on the screening, even though I wanted to see the film. BUT, I figured there was a good chance the film would be streaming on Disney+ by the time it popped up in my chain. I took a chance, and I was right - but it really didn't matter, because I've got the film sandwiched between two other films with the same actor, so even if I had to drop this film from my plans, if it hadn't turned up on streaming in time, I could have just not watched it and the chain would continue. This is why my chain right now is two films longer than it has to be, to get me to the end of the year - if I watch this one, it just means I need to drop one from the September or November chain, and I've got all the "middle" films in sets of three marked so I know where they are.  I think I know which film I want to drop, or delay until next year, perhaps, then I'll just have to drop one more along the way, and my count for the year will be a perfect 300. Easy peasy. 

Taika Waititi carries over from "Thor: Love and Thunder". 

THE PLOT: While spending years attempting to return home, marooned Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear encounters an army of ruthless robots commanded by Zurg who are attempting to steal his fuel source. 

AFTER: SPOILER ALERT warning, it's impossible to talk about this film that was released just a couple months ago 

It feels like this film got a really bad rap, Disney obviously considered it a "dud" because they moved it onto the Disney+ streaming platform so quickly - if it were making enough money at the box office, they would have kept it there, right?  But it "only" made $250 million, and it cost $225 million to make it, so by DisneyCorp. standards, that's a complete failure, I guess. Tell you what, Disney, a lot of small indie films would consider making "only" $25 million profit a total success, so it's all relative, isn't it?  I can sell you an animated film for only $10 million if you want, and then you can earn $40 million with it, and it will be more successful than "Lightyear" on your ledger, do we have a deal?  

The thing is, the story here is not so bad, it's pretty darn good, so it feels quite short-sighted to consider this a "failure" - the forced tie-in with "Toy Story" is probably the WORST thing about it, and maybe people went to the movies to see something akin to "Toy Story" and were disappointed that it wasn't THAT, but that's not really the movie's fault.  If this hadn't been about Buzz Lightyear but instead just some random new astronaut character, people wouldn't have come to see it with certain expectations, and things might have worked out differently.  For the record, this was designed to be the movie WITHIN the movie "Toy Story" that was Andy's favorite movie of 1995, the one that some fictional toy company based the Buzz Lightyear action figure on - so this is a fictional universe set inside another fictional universe, a bit like the "Inception" of animated films. That might be a lot for some people to wrap their brains around.

And it's got a good message for the kids, because Buzz Lightyear makes a mistake, he thinks it's his responsibility to save everyone, that acting alone to finish the mission makes for a great Space Ranger, so he has trouble allowing people to help him.  This hubris makes him think he knows more than the auto-pilot does, by taking a risk and ignoring the A.I.'s advice during take-off from a hostile planet, the spacecraft is damaged and can't leave the planet, so all the humans in hibernation have to be thawed out and are stranded on the planet, until they can use the resources of the planet to engineer a method of escape.  This means making a new "fuel crystal" with just the right mix of energy to achieve hyperspeed, but also building a colony and a mine and a space center to get this all done. 

And the colony needs a test-pilot, one willing to take the risk of flying an experimental aircraft out on a flight sling-shotting around a nearby star to achieve 100% hyperspeed - but the first flight can only get to 75% percent or so, so it's a failure.  But thanks to time dilation from traveling NEAR the speed of light, Buzz gets back from his four-minute flight to find that four years have passed on the planet.  This is some offshoot of Einstein's theory of relativity, I think - but it might be a big challenge, asking kids to understand that time is not absolute.  Most adults don't even understand why Matthew McConaughey's character in "Interstellar" ended up looking younger than his daughter. Traveling so fast essentially becomes a form of time-travel, only it's one-way, and the faster you go, the further into the future you end up.  I'm not 100% sure it works this way, but let's roll with it for now. 

Anyway, Buzz tries again and again, four years per try, at getting the fuel mixture right, and this means he only sees his best friend, boss and former Space Ranger Alisha every four years, and so he watches her fall in love, get married to her life partner (yep) and have a child, then watches that child grow up - from Buzz's point of view, everyone else is in fast-forward mode and they've all settled in to life at the colony, he's the only one who hasn't really settled in, despite the presence of a very helpful and friendly robot cat, who's part R2-D2 and can also talk. But crazy is another word for trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so is Buzz crazy or just obsessive about his mission?  

Murphy's Law dictates that his process takes too long, Alisha gets very old and then suddenly isn't there one day, and he's told that his mission objectives have changed JUST as the fuel formula gets perfected. This movie throws more technical problems at its characters, again and again, than "Rogue One" did, and that film basically devoted an entire hour to making a file transfer happen.  This is like an IT guy's nightmare, and I'm not sure kids are ready for this either, just two hours of solving bigger and bigger hardware and software issues.  Bad news, kids, this is what your adult lives might be all about.  Getting his spaceship to achieve hyperspeed is perhaps something of a metaphor for getting the cable installed, or the car fixed, or the phone to install the new software correctly.  Maybe all three at once.

In the latter part of the film, after a 22-year absence from the planet, Buzz gets help from a team of three unlikely rookie screw-ups - Alisha's granddaughter Izzy, a meek but well-intentioned klutz, and an elderly convict (??) who all mean well, but they constantly make mistakes.  There's that lesson again, keep trying until you fail upwards, figuratively and literally, like into orbit. Izzy's afraid of being in space because she's lived her whole life planet-side, so everyone on the team needs some special guidance from Buzz, and perhaps he can give them the benefit of his experience, being a former screw-up himself. Eventually the main villain from the Lightyear universe, Zurg, shows up, and the less said about that the better, because there are probably some "Toy Story" fans who aren't ready for the truth about Zurg that gets revealed here, which I guess directly contradicts the truth about Zurg revealed in "Toy Story 2". 

I've got to find a list now of all the Easter eggs, there are plenty of references to films like "2001", "Star Wars" and "Alien", I just want to see a breakdown.  And there are in-jokes for the parents, like when Buzz can't get his A.I. navigator to work right, he pulls it out of the dashboard and blows on it, like a classic Nintendo game. That's funny, but only to people of a certain age.  

This film was banned from 12 countries in the Middle East because it dared to show two female adults in a loving committed relationship and raising a child together.  Disney was almost willing to cave and cut a same-sex kiss between those two characters (after three other Asian countries requested the edit), but then all the news broke from Florida's Parental Rights in Education bill (aka the "Don't Say Gay" legislation), and DisneyCorp decided to double-down on the importance of having gay people represented in their films' storylines.  So yeah, all those countries that still think the issue is "too sensitive" to allow their citizens to see gay people in love and kissing - fuck those countries. If they don't agree with the politics of the films made in the liberal U.S., then they can't watch those films.  We Americans don't work for the Chinese and Arab countries, at least not yet. 

Also starring the voices of Chris Evans (last seen in "Free Guy"), Keke Palmer (last seen in "Cleaner"), Peter Sohn (last heard in "Luca"), Dale Soules (last seen in "Motherhood"), James Brolin (last seen in "Spielberg"), Uzo Aduba (last seen in "Tallulah"), Mary McDonald-Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last seen in "I Care a Lot"), Angus MacLane (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Bill Hader (last seen in "Clear History"), Efren Ramirez (last seen in "Gamer"), Keira Hairston. 

RATING: 7 out of 10 meat sandwiches (Lord help us if these get trendy)