Taking a beloved (?) character from the Pixar Toy Story franchise and giving him his own prequel story seems like a great idea to me.  Maybe Woody or the Potato Heads will get their own origin stories, too.  Plus, Lightyear is pure science fiction, my favorite film genre, so I was really anticipating this movie.  For the most part it succeeds and is a very entertaining motion picture.

Angus MacLane’s space adventure provides astronaut Buzz Lightyear with a rather different persona than he has in the Toy Story series, and that seems to bother a lot of viewers.  Not me.  As the movie’s prologue states, the Toy Story movies are about toys, specifically a toy based on this particular character.  This is the story of the actual character that inspired the toy.  Therefore it makes sense that the makers of the toy would change its personality to be more fun for kids.  The Buzz of Toy Story is a buffoon because it’s more fun for him to be that way than the straight-up heroism of the real Buzz that the toy is based on.  That’s how I see it, anyway.

So Buzz endures circumstances that force an expedition into space that he is leading to land and remain on a hostile planet.  He keeps trying to complete the technology needed for them to resume the mission, but when he finally succeeds it leads to a large time jump and more complications.  Buzz and a team of misfit cohorts encounter the Zurg, and have to determine whether to try to reset history (thereby erasing much of the recent past) or go forward as things currently stand.  It is a complex conundrum that may be too complicated for younger viewers to appreciate.

It is this conundrum that I think most disappoints viewers, including me.  I love the visual and thematic aspects of this true science fiction adventure and was really enjoying it, up to the point when the Zurg leader finally confronts Buzz.  At that point I felt completely let down.  The writers have fallen into this newly popular “alternate reality” trap and the movie suffers trying to resolve its issues from then on.  I really wish they had taken a different path, stayed to straight adventure and found a way to complete the tale without having to resort to this thematic mush.  This could have been an all-time great sci-fi adventure; still, the rest of the movie is a great deal of fun, and I like the original version of Buzz Lightyear as a heroic, if flawed, astronaut over him as a proud, arrogant, foolish toy.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  7 July 2022.