105 min | PG | June 17, 2022 | Walt Disney Pictures
A Space Ranger strands his crew on a hostile planet and spends decades trying to fly his way out. Every test flight he survives costs him years on the ground, so the people he loves keep aging out of his life while he stays the same. The hook is great. The reason it exists is the problem.
Buzz Lightyear is not a toy here. He is the man the toy is based on, a Space Ranger stranded on a hostile planet after a navigation error of his own making. He spends years running test flights to crack hyperspeed travel, and each four-minute mission costs him four years back at base. The film is about a man who cannot forgive himself and burns through everyone who loves him chasing a fix. The premise is sharper than the marketing suggests. This is a story about obsession and the cost of refusing help.
Chris Evans voices Buzz with a clenched military stiffness that loosens only when the character finally stops fighting. He plays the guilt straight and lets the comedy come from the people around him. Keke Palmer plays Izzy Hawthorne with nervous energy and a fear of space she has to talk herself through, and she grounds the rookie squad better than the script does. Peter Sohn voices SOX, the robot therapy cat, and steals every scene with flat deadpan delivery against an absurd design. Taika Waititi plays Mo Morrison as an anxious screw-up and Dale Soules plays Darby Steel as a paroled demolitions expert, and the trio of misfits carries the middle stretch.
Angus MacLane directs from a script he wrote with Jason Headley, and he builds the action around a real visual idea. The time dilation lets the film age the world while Buzz stays the same, so each return to base shows a colony that has moved on without him. The animation renders the planet’s atmosphere with a heavy, filtered light that makes the hostile world feel lived in. The score leans on a brass-forward sci-fi register that quotes the wonder of older space movies. The dogfight sequences are clean and legible, with the camera tracking the ships through hyperspeed in long unbroken arcs.
The trouble is the spin-off frame. Lightyear keeps reminding you it exists to explain a character you already know, and that scaffolding limits where the story can go. The emotional core about lost time lands when the film commits to it and stalls when it pivots to franchise obligation. SOX is the most inventive thing on screen and the most disposable to the plot. There is a leaner, stranger film buried in this one, and the machinery built to justify its own existence keeps getting in its way.