Lightyear: To Infinity, but Not Quite Beyond

I am a huge fan of science fiction, anything involving the concept of “rangers,” and cats.  Pixar’s new Lightyear movie could not have targeted my niche demographic more if the intro crawl had said “For Jake.”  And to the filmmaker’s credit, I did have a good time with it.  It doesn’t quite hit the upper tier of Pixar movies, but Lightyear leaves some other recent installments in the hyperspatial dust.

***Spoilers Ahead***

I plan on covering a specific point, so I’ll breeze over most of my likes and dislikes.  On the negative side, Evil Buzz as the villain didn’t quite work for me. The deus ex machina of him happening across a massive ship with a robot army in the far future that he somehow turns into a time machine gave me acid reflux.  I get what they were going for. Showing Buzz the dark place where a focus on the mission over relationships might take him was a good thought.  It’s the backstory supporting the villain that needed polish. 

The star of the movie is obviously Sox.  I now exist in a darker world, knowing I was born decades too soon to have a Sox of my own.  The amusement of an artificial therapy cat piloted by AI advanced enough to solve a nigh-impossible mechanical and chemical engineering problem while also managing to distract himself with a built-in laser pointer cannot be measured.  Where I credit the filmmakers most, though, was nailing to tranquilizer dart gag *twice* with the same “I bought you five minutes” line.  I can say with absolute certainty that Evil Buzz stomping on his Sox was my most traumatic film experiences in recent memory.

Now, onto the point that made me want to write about Lightyear at all.  Evil Buzz has a robot army at his beck and call that mostly serve as unremarkable cannon fodder.  However, the first robot Buzz faces breaks the mold by getting significant solo screen time.  The broken machine—who we see get lobotomized by a harpoon—claws its way back from virtual death to track Buzz down, scene by scene.  The audience is led to believe this robot has significance. Why else would we see three-plus scenes focusing on just this one robot as it follows Buzz’s trail like a futuristic bloodhound?  Then finally, the moment of delivering on that unexplained promise comes.  The robot sees Buzz and crew fleeing from a host of other robots and boosts off in pursuit. 

What comes next?  Did the aforementioned lobotomy do the obvious thing and rewire the robot to want to help Buzz instead?  Did it come with fiery vengeance and singlehandedly destroy their escape craft?  Did it do anything of note?  Of course not.  The robot got in front of Buzz’s ship and gets run over. Then it falls in line with the rest of the cannon fodder with no discernible difference aside from its missing arm. 

Why spend time talking about this virtually meaningless point from a movie that will soon fade from the collective media consciousness, you ask?  Because promises are important.

I have written one novel and have half a chapter to go before finishing the draft of another.  One of the areas I struggle with the most is setting up and delivering on promises across the story.  That issue comes from writing these two novels as a gardener (aka seat-of-the-pants, stream of consciousness) instead of an architect (aka an outliner).  When you plan your story out from foundation to crenelations, you can draw clear lines from promises to delivery at the outset, making it easier to form those connections in the reader’s mind.  As a gardener, you have to look back on an overgrown patch of competing ideas and try to weed out the rotten bits without severing whatever connections do exist, all while growing new ones as necessary.  This is, to put it in a word, difficult.

What I saw when I watched that robot amount to nothing was a visualization of my own problems.  I can think of multiple unsatisfying promise fulfils in my first novel off the top of my head (thus why it’s on hold at the moment). The novel currently in draft has even more.  Telling a story is a contract between the storyteller and the audience.  The audience agrees to offer up a portion of their finite time on this world, and the storyteller promises to entertain them.  That promise of entertainment then breaks down into countless other promises and fulfilments over the course of the story (good triumphs over evil, the hero/heroine gets the girl/boy, etc).  If the storyteller fails to execute on those tactical level promises, they’ll never accomplish the primary objective—entertaining the audience.

Lightyear manages to entertain in a myriad of ways and fulfills plenty of promises.  But like an unexpected tranquilizer dart shot from the mouth of a standard-issue artificial therapy cat helping its patient escape lawful confinement, the ultimately insignificant robot brings me down.