The one smart meta decision here is casting an A-lister like Chris Evans to do what amounts to nothing more than a Tim Allen impression, a winking suggestion that in the "Toy Story" universe, somebody of Evans' caliber refused to return to the recording booth to voice the action figure. We're introduced to his Buzz towards the end of a dangerous mission, which ends with him crash landing over 1,000 people on a resource-heavy but inhospitable planet 4.2 million lightyears from Earth. Naturally, he experiences guilt for causing everybody to be stuck here, so takes it upon himself to test out a new form of fuel in a test flight that could get everybody back home; unfortunately, he fails the first test, and comes back to the planet discovering that four years have passed in what was only four minutes for him. That's right folks, it's "Interstellar," Pixar-style, and perhaps the only time in history a Christopher Nolan film has triggered a greater emotional response than a "Toy Story" one.
Over the course of a montage director MacLane likely thinks is every bit as powerful as the opening sequence to "Up," we see Buzz try and fail the mission several times, his loved ones passing away — until one day, he crash lands decades further into a future overrun by robots controlled by the Emperor Zurg. To save the people on this planet, he must team up with an unruly band of rebels led by Izzy Hawthorne (Keke Palmer), the granddaughter of his best friend and fellow commanding officer Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), who shares her grandmother's adventurous spirit, while remaining terrified of space.
Since Bill Condon, the director of Disney's live action "Beauty and the Beast" remake, remarked upon an "exclusively gay moment" in the film (which took place entirely in the background), scrutiny of lackluster LGBTQ+ representation in blockbusters has only increased. Pixar aren't immune from this — lest we forget the dreadful inclusion of a policewoman character in 2020's "Onward" who referenced having a wife in passing, a single line of dialogue that was subsequently edited out for international audiences in deeply conservative countries. "Lightyear" offers genuinely substantial representation, due to the prominence of Alisha Hawthorne, a lesbian character whose sexuality can't simply be erased by dubbing over her dialogue. We see her with her wife, her granddaughter becomes a major character, and she herself remains crucial to the narrative even as the years pass on. It's the bare minimum gay viewers like myself have been demanding of studios, but still feels refreshing after several years of characters who exist purely to talk about their partners in sequences that will be heavily re-edited for the Chinese and Russian releases anyway.
Quite unfortunately, this aspect is also one of the several ways the film clashes with the director's stated intention to make a believable science fiction blockbuster of the 1970's. Such extensive (at least compared to other studio blockbusters) representation remains a rare sight in a contemporary Hollywood production, so would feel completely out of place in a family adventure released in a much earlier era. Conservative studio executives were even nervous to leave the scene in the final cut as recently as April of this year, only changing their mind after a vocal backlash from fans. Due to the political climate the film is being released into, it feels harsh to criticize what amounts to substantive, positive representation in a film that will be seen far and wide. In this case, I might sidestep the criticism altogether and choose to believe the "Toy Story" universe has long been far more progressive than ours, so this thankfully would never have been an issue in a movie released there.
