Review: Pixar’s Lightyear squanders its sci-fi reboot potential

Enlarge / This Buzz Lightyear is supposed to be the "real-life" version of the character, which the real-life humans in Toy Story saw before buying the cuter toy version of the Buzz character. Still with me? Yes, this week's new Pixar film is weird. (credit: Disney / Pixar)

Hollywood has produced quite a few superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy "origin" films, which rewind a series' timeline to take a deeper look at a popular character. But I'm not sure we've ever seen a film that goes to the trouble of telling the origin story... of a manufactured toy in a fictional universe.

That is what this week's Lightyear is: a fictional film that explains why a fictional toy was created in another fictional film. The overly serious Toy Story hero Buzz Lightyear, full of catch phrases and push-action tricks on his plastic spacesuit, wasn't originally a children's cartoon character, Pixar now says. The toy we grew to love was actually the children's-toy version of a serious "live-action" sci-fi hero—or, at least, live in the way that Andy was a "real" person in the Toy Story universe.

Buzz looks lost—in more ways than one. (credit: Disney / Pixar)

Part of me hoped that such a twist on an existing fictional character would let Pixar run wild with classic sci-fi inspirations. But that's not what Lightyear is. This new film, debuting exclusively in theaters, is nowhere near the tribute to past boundary-pushing blockbusters that its trailer suggested.