It’s everything Maverick stands against. Which one you will like probably comes down to your thoughts on that statement.
After having watched Top Gun Maverick, I found sitting through the entirety of Lightear to be something of a paradox shift. In almost every single way imaginable Lightyear is the total opposite of the ethos of Top Gun. It is like morality whiplash going from one movie to the other. In order to do this review correctly, I’m going to need to spoil both movies. Please be aware of that before reading any farther.
In Top Gun Maverick, Tom Cruise’s character feels the need to protect a fallen comrade’s son out of a fatherly duty. The reason he does so is because he is not sure that the person put in his charge is ready for the task at hand, and he wants him to not meet a negative fate. In the end, he helps Rooster rise to the moment and achieve the mission. In Lightyear however, this new Buzz who looks, acts, and sounds nothing like the Buzz you know, learns the lesson that he must accept incompetence and inability without mentoring people into a better place. It is explicitly said in this movie out loud that Buzz Lightyear does not need to need to save the incompetent people he is stuck with, but rather he simply needs to join them as they are. You could not have more drastically different messages in two films… and of course, all the people Buzz doesn’t need to save are people of darker skin.
Let’s just say that Lightyear does not deal in subtle messages. Instead, it has a mission to convince you that meritocracy is bad, masculinity and instinctual decisions are wrong, and we all need to accept each other as we are with all of our flaws rather than to see the potential in each person. It dives into those themes with the nuance of a caffeinated kid with a baseball bat swinging for a pinata.
In order to prove to you that you must accept others with all of their flaws, and that merit is wrong, Buzz Lightyear is stuck with three of the most annoying, incompetent characters I have ever witnessed on any movie screen. When they appear, and they are there much or most of the time, I could not help but understand exactly why Buzz wants away from them. They are infantile and imbecilic. Buzz already accepts that he is not the best Space Ranger. And in this movie he already takes the blame for events that seem totally out of his control for which he is not guilty. But that is not enough. This Buzz Lightyear must lower himself to a group that is wholly inadequate for the mission at hand, rather than being a noble leader. And when the movie is over, the final lesson is that failure is okay.
If you are curious about the lesbian relationship that has been part of the marketing for this movie, and whether or not it’s all overblown or a big deal, I’m here to tell you that it is an integral part of the story. I’m also here to tell you that the lesbian couple become pregnant in this movie, so if you have children of an inquisitive age, you need to be ready to somehow explain artificial insemination after leaving a Buzz Lightyear movie. Maybe your child will miss it, but if they figure out that two girls became pregnant, you’re going to have questions coming your way. In fact, Buzz Lightyear is actually the bad guy in this movie, and the correct answer as presented in this film is for Buzz Lightyear to not fix the catastrophe that he believes he created, because doing so would cause the lesbian couple to never meet or have a family. It is never explained why that is the case, but this movie script is never so smart as to spend time explaining that sort of thing.
Furthermore, the movie is greatly missing the voice talents of Tim Allen. Chris Evans is droll and lacks the vocal plasticity needed to carry this movie. I know they wanted to go for a more somber presentation, but that’s a little hard to buy into given that the movie has adults wearing giant toy costumes which look nothing like what a Space Ranger outfit might be. It is quite jarring to see them wearing suits that have the proportions of toys.
So then, the question becomes what does work in this movie? And the answer to that is that the robot cat is actually better than I would have anticipated. I can’t think of anything else really that I enjoyed. It’s probably better than Cars 2 or The Good Dinosaur, but beyond that I struggle to think of any Pixar film that I would place under Lightyear. It’s better than Jurassic World Dominion, but that’s only because JWD didn’t make any sense. Lightyear does, it’s just a horrible message. I also don’t know that I would recommend taking a child to see this film, even though the characters are clearly aimed at the preschool level. I don’t know that I could endorse sending kids to a movie that teaches something I believed to be wrong. I’m not talking about anything to do with sexual orientation, but instead I’m talking about the idea that we shouldn’t strive towards competency. I also don’t remember the last movie that I saw where the bad guy gave his plan and I thought “well there might be something to that.”
Score: 3.5 (Poor)
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