Lightyear (2022)

When I first watched the trailer of "Lightyear" I've asked myself how entangled can the subject be to get from "Toy Story" to a space oddisey. I've got my answer in the first 5 seconds of the film: “In 1995 Andy got a toy. That toy was based on a movie. This is that movie.” I must say I admire this as the simplest, elegant and most open way to create a spin-off that I've ever seen on screen. Unfortunately it's pretty much the only thing I can admire here.

I've never been to drawn into the "Toy Story" universe, and probably that's why the last iteration left me with the best opinion, contrary to the general appreciation. I guess that's also the reason why I had high expectations from something announcing itself quite different from the usual "Toy Story" contexts. In "Lightyear", Buzz - the guy on the poster - is an astronaut on a ship carrying several thousand people, apparently during an exploration mission meant to find a habitable planet. When stopping on a potential candidate that finally proves unfriendly due to the indigenous fauna, Buzz damages the ship so badly that discovering a new fuel is required for flying back to "infinity and beyond". Feeling guilty for the situation, our astronaut dedicates his time for testing diverse variations of space fuel. However, each flight of several minutes costs him several years on the planet time. And the life on the planet moves on, finally getting to a fully organized colony, where people moving to the next generation start forgetting that they want to leave. Exactly when, finally, the last tried formul for the space-propelling cocktail seems to be the right one. The problem gets more acute when Buzz, after the first successful test, lands back in the middle of an alien invasion led by the evil Zurg, who somehow seems strangely interested exactly in the newly found space fuel. Well, up to this point the movie was fine. From here onward, it's somehow predictable what happens = Mortal Kombat: Buzz vs Zurg - where finally - big spoiler, we find out that Zurg is actually an older Buzz who discovered also the time travel and wants to "fix the past", but ran out of gas. Even that is relatively fine in the economy of the story, nevermind my debatable and ethically questionable decision to support Zurg's side in this case. And on top of everything the whole SciFi universe created by Pixar, despite the logical flaws, is actually really immersive due to the amount of details. So, what's wrong with this picture?

Warning: my thoughts might get a bit off the rail from here on. The wrong part I've seen in this movie is the "dream team" that sticks to Buzz for helping him to get the planet free from Zurg. The team is formed of three characters who Buzz finds quickly after his last landing, apparently the only who escaped capture by the enemy, and also enrolled as cadets in the space rangers training programme. In brief, the three seem to be in a continuous competition on who's messing things up more often and showing how unprepared they are for their "job". And all this stuff is supposed to be funny. Well, it's not. Also, all this stuff should appear as having a minimum importance in reaching the obvious happy end - keeping the politically correct spirit of "anybody can be a space ranger" no matter of how persistent you are in doing the same mistakes. I might agree witht the first part, but only if you're striving to succeed. Here, at least for one of the characters, it's obvious that placing him under quarantine would considerably increase the probability that the rest of the team survives. But of course that won't be an acceptable course of action - the movie getting quite explicit in a scene where it teaches us that's intolerable to not tolerate the mistake. So... no matter how light the context is in an animation, and as weird as it may be that I'm giving so much importance, I find disturbing to see in a movie that finally targets mostly children that the idea of tolerable mistake is always valid and that "rocket science" could be your path in life, no restrictions set, even though you might be alergic to space dust - but well, let's not discriminate. Even the subliminal supports the same direction by changing the purpose of Lightyear's actions, finally giving up on the goal of fixing his initial mistake and preventing also Zurg to fix it, ending up accepting the planet as it is. I can understand the educational reasoning of introducing even in animations elements of equality and tolerance - concerning gender, race, human behavior, whatever. But it finally depends on where all this stops. Leading such "accept anything" policies so far that you get to prioritize an idea of equity over other aspects as competences, and presenting the triumph of mediocrity as a success... well, that's dangerous. And maybe I wouldn't have written so much about this, but I can spot this tendency too often lately... and sometime during a sunny day, it might bite back, and hard.

Rating: 3 out of 5 - because if you can ignore the last paragraph above, it's actually nice as a SciFi animation