Pun Salad

I was somewhat surprised to like this movie quite a bit. The IMDB raters despised it. The reviews I read were brutal. (To be fair, the numbers at Rotten Tomatoes are kinder.) Conservative Tim Allen was rudely shoved aside, replaced by pinko Chris Evans.

I might have been less sympathetic if I'd shelled out movie-theater cash. But it showed up as a free-to-me Disney+ streamer last Tuesday, so…

The setup is that Toy Story's Andy saw this movie back in 1991, which prompted his demand for his Buzz Lightyear action figure, setting off the events of that movie. OK, fine. Buzz is in charge of a colonization mission, responsible for the lives of 1200 or so civilians. He is an I'll-do-it-myself kind of guy, not a team player at all, so when disaster occurs as the ship crashes trying to escape from an aggressively hostile planet, Buzz blames himself.

His efforts to repair the ship and resume his mission involve a considerable amount of relativistic time dilation, as he endeavors to discover just the right mix of fuel elements that will power up the ship again. Along the way, he acquires a robotic cat, and a misfit bunch of helpers. All building up to his inevitable conflict with Zurg. (Big revision from Toy Story 2: Zurg is not Buzz's dad, but…)

OK, so there was some lesbianism involved. Buzz is cool with it, so I was too, although my eyes may have rolled a bit. The "teamwork with a diverse cast" is also heavy-handed, but equally easy to ignore. Bottom line: I had fun.

And, to tell the truth, I couldn't tell the difference between Tim Allen's Buzz voice and Chris Evans'.