There are spoilers in this post for Pixar's Lightyear.
Even after 18 months of Disney/marketing Pixar's machine preparing the path, the movie still feels the need to open with a recapitulation of its premise: Chris Evans tied himself in knots trying to explain the premise of Lightyear, and even after 18 months of Disney/marketing Pixar's machine preparing the path, the movie still feels the need to open with a recapitulation of its premise: "For his birthday in 1995, a young kid called Andy received a Buzz Lightyear toy. It was a scene from one of his favourite films. "This is the film." That odd setup—this isn't the birth of Toy Story's bellicose action figure, but the concept behind him—at the very least relieves the film of the necessity to flawlessly integrate with its source material. (It's a sad condition of affairs that that sentence is even comprehensible.) As befits the concept,
Emperor Zurg appears in the Toy Story films dressed as Ming the Merciless and speaking in a Darth Vader voice, threatening to destroy the galaxy for the sake of rule and throwing Buzz off by claiming to be his biological father. (The Toy Story wiki is split on whether or not to take this statement at face value.) Zurg's reasons are even more enigmatic in Lightyear. Buzz becomes preoccupied with completing his original mission after crash-landing a colony ship on a hostile alien planet. He reconstructs the technology that would let the spacecraft reach hyperspeed and leave the world behind. Meanwhile, the colonists resolve to carry out their mission, even though the site has changed: They set out to create something fresh.
Meanwhile, Buzz continues to fly test flights, attempting to find new types of spacecraft fuel that will get him close enough to the speed of light to cause time dilation effects. On the surface, years pass each time he journeys into space. Everyone he knows ages and dies, leaving him with only his task. (Well, almost everything—this being a Pixar film, after all, and he also gets a friendly mechanical cat.)
Buzz eventually perfects the formula, accelerates to the speed of light (thankfully, unlike in one of Disney's other pointless sci-fi spinoffs, we are spared the moment where he obtains his surname), and returns to inform the colonists that they can finally depart. However, this time he's travelled even further into the future, and the colony now faces a new threat: Zurg's army of robot sentinels, who want the fuel for themselves. Buzz doesn't understand why until he eventually meets Zurg—or, to be more precise (and here comes the big reveal), Zurg/himself. Emperor Zurg is revealed to be none other than Buzz from another reality, an older, jaded version (voiced by James Brolin) from a future that has figured out how to harness technology.
It's evident that Zurg isn't just Buzz from a few decades ago: This isn't an older Buzz Lightyear, but the extrapolation of Buzz Lightyear's single-minded dedication to duty, as Chris Evans might describe it. This Buzz—call lets him Bad Buzz—is so intent on accomplishing his job that he doesn't care how much harm he causes or whether it defeats the mission's purpose. His strategy is to use Buzz's fuel to travel further back in time (his supply has run out) and prevent the ship from becoming stranded in the first place. Buzz analyses everything that would be lost if he did that: his ex-partner's happy marriage, and the son she had with him.
Buzz, on the other hand, isn't having it. He's learnt that other people matter, that the connections you build with them are vital and that no purpose is more important than the people it's supposed to help. In essence, this is a reimagined version of the lesson that Buzz continues to learn in the Toy Story films: teamwork is preferable to going it alone, and friends are preferable to subordinates. (It doesn't explain why Buzz from Toy Story seems to have forgotten that his archenemy is himself, but perhaps that was too much for the back of the blister pack.) Buzz learns from a shadow version of himself, which Lightyear tries to make psychodramatic (I promise the movie tries).
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