Lightyear
Lightyear is what happens when a beloved toy’s mysterious backstory is replaced with a very literal, very serious space movie that somehow forgets to be fun. The film boldly answers the question no one was asking: “What if Buzz Lightyear, but he’s tired?” Instead of the adventurous, charismatic hero you’d expect, we get a version of Buzz who spends most of the runtime looking like he just realised he left the oven on back on Earth.
The movie tries to juggle time travel, space exploration, and emotional depth, but ends up dropping all three like a claw machine that refuses to grab anything. The pacing is oddly frantic yet somehow dull, racing through major plot points while still feeling like it’s going nowhere. Even the action scenes, which should be the highlight, feel strangely weightless—like watching someone else play a mid-tier video game with the brightness turned all the way down.
There are glimpses of something better buried in here, mostly whenever the film stops taking itself so seriously, but they’re fleeting. By the end, it feels less like an origin story for a legendary space ranger and more like a confusing detour that accidentally wandered into cinemas. It’s not outright disastrous, but it does manage to make the idea of infinite space feel impressively small.