Lightyear (2022)

Prequel movies often fall into the trap of trying to explain all sorts of weird, needlessly specific details about the stories they lead into: “Black Widow” (2021) wasted time showing us where Natasha Romanoff got a cargo vest that she wore in “Avengers: Infinity War” (2018), “Solo” (2018) made it unnecessarily clear where Han got his blaster; and “Minions” (2015) exists.

Fortunately, “Lightyear” (2022) avoided those traps while still establishing the character of Buzz Lightyear (Chris Evans) both as his own character in a movie and as the basis for the action figurine Buzz (Tim Allen) that we were introduced to in “Toy Story” (1995). This Buzz was a haughty, over-confident Space Ranger on board the colony ship Turnip, headed for a far-off new planet. He constantly used his arm communicator to record logs, followed a particularly draconian code of conduct, and wanted to do anything and everything in his power to make the mission happen. All things that hark straight back to the action figure we were introduced to in almost three decades ago.

Introduced in “Toy Story 2” (1999), Emperor Zurg (James Brolin) made his appropriately villainous appearance here, hunting down the macguffin power crystal that Buzz was after too. While Buzz wanted it to power the Turnip, Zurg wanted it to fulfill personal ambitions at the cost of anyone and everyone around him.

There’s currently a lot of internet hubbub about the “gay scene” in this movie, which is absolutely making a mountain out of a molehill. There’s a lesbian couple shown over time as components of a larger montage. There’s maybe 30 seconds of them on screen in the entire movie.

Said hubbub is being driven by the same kinds of pearl-clutching window-lickers who didn’t like “Turning Red” (2022) because it was about teenagers being rebellious and an allegory for girls getting their periods.

If you find yourself offended by either of the above concepts, please take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself why.

Anyway.

This movie was made by Pixar, so the animation style was cartoony without being outlandish, and internal to itself, nothing looked out of place. If you liked the art style of the Toy Story series, this will fit.

The soundtrack was written by Michael Giacchino, but was very lackluster, which is a shame. He wrote the magnificent soundtracks to “Star Trek” (2009) and the Disney-Marvel “Spiderman” movies (2017, 2019, 2021), but nothing about this stuck in my head. I cannot remember anything about the “Lightyear” music.

There was a lot of fun in the rag-tag band of misfits that Buzz ended up with: Izzy (Keke Palmer), Mo (Taika Waititi), and Darby (Dale Soules), most of which involved them actively failing at whatever task was at hand, whether it was as simple as turning on a computer or firing a laser gun. You could feel Buzz’s frustration with their rookie mistakes, though the movie avoided being annoying about it, and all of them overcoming said rookie-ness made for surprisingly cathartic character development when they ultimately got it together to defend the colony against Zurg’s attack.

“Lightyear” was cute. It wasn’t particularly novel, it didn’t break ground in any way, it wasn’t even a particularly fiction-y sci-fi plot, and it won’t win any awards for anything, but it was fun enough.

It was a good family-friendly movie about character development, overcoming adversity, and learning to work together with people who aren’t like you.

It earned a solid 3 Claw review; worth seeing, but not worth paying for to see in theaters unless you’re a die-hard Chris Evans fan.

If you want a really good sci-fi Pixar movie, go watch “Wall*E” (2008)