Miss Flicks

Lightyear: Film Review

I’m a huge fan of the Toy Story franchise but I felt very sceptical about this spin-off Lightyear because it seemed like an obvious cash-grab – and the film never persuaded me otherwise.

Pixar’s four-strong Toy Story franchise centred around the toys belonging to Andy, led by Woody and Buzz Lightyear. The space ranger toy was merch from Andy’s favourite movie – and Lightyear is that movie.

The film follows Buzz (now voiced by Chris Evans) and his fellow ranger Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) on a mission to discover if a planet is hospitable. When they discover it’s not, they try to make an escape but their ship is destroyed. After several missions off-planet to try and get them home, Buzz returns to find that time has significantly jumped and the evil Zurg is out to get him.

I don’t think the story does enough to justify its existence. The plot is really weak, lightweight and ultimately quite pointless. It has fun moments and it’s entertaining enough but I struggled to care about the story or the characters. There was one quite moving moment toward the start but after that, I was only invested in the livelihood of the robot cat Sox (Peter Sohn)!

There is plenty of adventure and hijinks, so I’m sure children will still enjoy it. Toy Story fans will probably also get a kick out of hearing (toy) Buzz’s catchphrases (like ‘To infinity and beyond!’) in a different context and you must listen out for the less obvious ones too. The film is also quite funny – I laughed out loud a bunch of times and almost always because of Sox. He was so adorable and hilarious!

Since the start of the pandemic, a lot of Pixar features have gone straight to Disney+ instead of the cinema. That decision surely didn’t have anything to do with quality because Luca and Turning Red are excellent (Soul wasn’t up there for me but it’s still good) and are definitely more worthy of a cinematic release than Lightyear. Presumably, this is because those were originals and Disney expected Lightyear to do better as it’s based on existing IP (which they’re mining for all it’s worth)!

It’s a shame this film doesn’t use Tim Allen‘s voice, to be honest. I have no problem with Evans and he does a fine job but Allen IS the voice of Buzz and it’s a shame to not use him. Aduba brings warmth and heart to Hawthorne and Keke Palmer is upbeat as her granddaughter Izzy. We’ve heard Taika Waititi‘s voice work before with Korg in Thor: Ragnarok (which he reprises in Love and Thunder) and he does the same sort of dumb schtick with Izzy’s teammate Mo. The hilarious Dale Soules rounds out their ragtag crew as “elderly convict” Darby.

I expected more substance from this movie and thought I would feel super excited by it but it was just fine. Shame.

In cinemas now