Lightyear delivers on most of our Pixar movie expectations, despite a shaky take-off

Year after year, Pixar movies have managed to marry art and commerce in a way very few other studios have. Catering to a certain audience, and yet carrying an innovation and saying something very humane, simple yet profound - this is what has helped Pixar connect with us so often, with films like Up, Inside Out , Coco and countless others, making it such a formidable brand that it is today. Their latest creation Lightyear might not exactly live up to the hype or expectations of an origin story for Buzz, one of the most lovable characters of the Toy Story franchise, and yet it boasts of all of those ingredients that make it a Pixar studios creation.

Lightyear starts off a bit shakily, as space-rangers Buzz (Chris Evans) and Alisha (Uzo Aduba) find themselves and their space station stranded on a different planet. Buzz finds himself responsible for achieving the hyper-speed that can help their station go back to their base planet, and continues to undertake the speed-test mission repeatedly to make up for his misstep and redeem himself.  There is a heartwarming montage at this point, with Buzz’s dogged mission-flights interspersed with his return to base where Buzz realise every attempt of his in space accounts for years of life on this hostile planet. As Buzz sees his co-ranger and close friend Alisha goes through a whole cycle of life, there is a great sense of melancholy here to Buzz as he observes how life has passed him by. Underneath Buzz’s dogged perseverance is his guilt about failing Alisha, his co-ranger who lived her entire life on a stranded planet, all owing to his mistake.

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And while the film does well to establish the camaraderies and closeness between Buzz and Alisha, so that these sequences make an impact, it’s not enough to sustain us through Buzz’s space-adventures which begin to feel dreary and lacklustre after a point. The film struggles to gather momentum in its second act even as Buzz finds himself in the company of three underdog accomplices Mo (Taika Waititi), Izzy (Keke Palmer) and Darby (Dale Soules) - not to mention his robot cat Sox (Peter Sohn) - while attempting to make progress in his mission. There are only a handful of moments and sequences in the second act that grab your attention - Otherwise, Lightyear gets too mired up in its quest-driven stretches which do not offer enough spectacle to keep us engaged.  Even as the writers make sparse yet effective use of two of these underdogs - Mo and Darby, whose warring personalities make for some hilarious banter -  there is something about these stretches that don’t deliver the adrenaline or thrill that on a conceit level surely seems promising.

The overwhelming blend of whimsy and emotional heft that is the hallmark of any Pixar movie, arrives for Lightyear much past its midpoint when it attempts to explore Buzz’s philosophical bent.

Lightyear does well to establish Buzz early on as a go-getter with his own share of quirks and eccentricities. Even during some of the tensest moments, Buzz never fails to record his observations of any new territory and his steps, in his pursuit of maintaining a sincere, steadfast log that nobody else will probably ever listen to. More importantly, we see Buzz as this self-critical trooper who never stops trying or expecting any lesser from himself. He is a perfectionist, and that is his undoing as well. At a tender moment, when Mo, an anxious self-doubting figure is feeling guilty about a major misstep on his part, Izzy asks Buzz to boost his morale - and the best Buzz can come up with is, “you could have done better.” There is nothing more important for Buzz than this mission, which he is confident he can better complete when left on his own. However, This is where the Pixar-special moment kicks in, as the second half offers us a twist that shifts Buzz’s perspective on his mission and life, giving him a much-needed epiphany - it is only around these portions that Lightyear comes close to fulfilling the expectations we hold from it.

We have another strong character in Izzy, who is enthusiastic and a resilient creature on the surface but deep down has existential issues of her own, most damning of them being the looming legacy of her grandmother Alisha whose legendary space-ranger shoes Izzy finds hard to fill in. There is one affecting thread about Izzy’s fear of flying in space which continues to overwhelm her even as she tries helping Buzz in his  space-quests, but the writers do not fully tap the emotionality of her arc and struggles. There is one moment as Izzy finally takes a giant leap surpassing all her fears, but it doesn’t build up in the way we want it to.

However, Lightyear resolves a lot of its issues in its final act where humor, thrill, and emotional shifts blend in just the right measures. (One particular running joke around Mo’s obsession with an ordinary-looking pen which he remains fixated to find a use for leads to a fabulous payoff, and one of the most satisfyingly funny moments of the film.) And when we finally arrive at the poignant unions and more optimistic life lessons about communion, these feel earnest and earned.

After a shaky take-off, Lightyear somehow manages a smooth landing. And while it remains that this is not one of the better works of Pixar, Lightyear makes it worthwhile eventually.

BH Harsh is a film critic who spends most of his time watching movies and making notes, hoping to create, as Peggy Olsen put it, something of lasting value.

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