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)
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