Lightyear Review: To Mediocrity, and Beyond!

We’ve been living so long in a realm of perpetual nostalgia, of sequels, legacyquels, reboots, and reimaginings that it was perhaps only a matter of time before Hollywood tried to reverse engineer a nostalgia-ready blockbuster. Such is the case with Toy Story pseudo-prequel, Lightyear, which opens with on-screen text informing us that what we’re about to see is the film that captured a little boy named Andy’s affection and spawned the Buzz Lightyear action figure that he was given for his birthday in 1995.

The wisecracking MCU-style banter and prominent Black and lesbian representation of Angus MacLane’s film may separate it from a blockbuster that would’ve existed in 1995, but it still manages to reproduce some of the worst excesses of the tent poles of yore, namely a more-is-always-more approach to action. In theory, Lightyear’s premise is a clever route out of the nostalgia trap, for playing on our knowledge of and presumed affection for Buzz Lightyear, while allowing the filmmakers to craft something completely new. In practice, though, the film is one of Pixar’s least inspired releases to date, a slickly produced but soulless spectacle whose jokey banter and wall-to-wall space-opera action drowns out the story’s emotional beats.

The film opens as Buzz (Chris Evans) and his Space Ranger commander, Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), crash-land their ship on a hostile alien planet. Buzz is determined to get Alisha and the ship’s large crew back to Earth by pulling off a difficult flying maneuver in outer space that requires him to travel near the speed of light. The problem is that, due to time dilation, our hero, with each unsuccessful solo mission that he makes, returns to a planet that’s aged four years even though he’s only been away for a few hours. This leads to the film’s most memorable sequence, an Up-riffing montage in which Alisha gets married, has a family, and grows old and dies, all while Buzz, who ages only a few weeks, barely notices.

This should be a passage of almost unbearable sadness, but in contrast to the hyper-concentrated poignancy of Up’s first 10 minutes, Lightyear’s attempted reflection on the fleeting nature of mortality falls surprisingly flat. The sequence is conceptually ingenious but frustratingly indifferent in its execution, lacking in all those meticulously crafted visual details that typically bring Pixar’s unabashed sentimentality to vivid life. Indeed, the overall look of the film is disappointingly unimaginative, a conglomeration of elements borrowed from the canon of science fiction cinema—the bug aliens from Starship Troopers here, the light trip from 2001: A Space Odyssey there, and set designs cribbed from Star Wars all over the place.

Sadly, the film’s plot and characters are no more distinctive than its visuals. After Buzz finally successfully completes his flight, he finds himself nearly a century in the future, where he joins up with a motley crew of misfits—including Alisha’s granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer)—to take on the evil Emperor Zurg (James Brolin), who’s trying to take over the alien planet.

Naturally, our team of heroes manage to break down Buzz’s self-serious exterior while also teaching him a thing or two about the value of teamwork. But it’s hard to care about this emotional evolution given its circumscribed nature and the character’s banality. A generically courageous do-gooder in the Buck Rogers mold, the Buzz of Lightyear ultimately lacks the depths of passion and character that infuse the plastic action figure that he inspired.