RogerBW's Blog

Lightyear (2022) 08 July 2023

2022 animated action, dir. Angus MacLane, Chris Evans, Keke Palmer: IMDb / allmovie. Buzz the Space Ranger learns to be a good person.

Well, all right, this is not a Toy Story film and was never intended to be. But if you take that away… the character of Buzz was clearly a Captain Power-style generic space hero, designed more than anything else to make money in merchandising and advertising, and this… isn't that either.

It's trying to be a serious science fiction film about loss and personal growth and time travel, but most of the time it just comes over as generic action-adventure. Every character is one-note. Even Taika Waititi can't manage to make his part interesting. Technology does what it needs to do in the moment, nothing more nothing less, like magic in a bad fantasy trilogy.

Wreck-It Ralph did the whole bug attack swarm sequence much better ten years earlier, and that was a parody. This is filmmaking by the numbers, spun up out of a list of publisher's messages and merchandising opportunities, with no soul at all.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.

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See also:
Wreck-It Ralph

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