Lightyear

Skippable, and the most confused object in the franchise. It is not a film about the Buzz Lightyear from the other films. The conceit, explained in a single title card at the start and nowhere else, is that this is the science-fiction film that existed inside the world of Toy Story in 1995, the one Andy saw, which is why the toy was made. Nothing in it is in continuity with anything, because within the fiction it is itself a fiction.

That premise is the whole problem. It is a clever idea for a sentence and an unworkable one for a feature, because it asks the audience to hold a frame that the film then never uses. Nothing about the storytelling, the design or the dialogue reads as a 1995 children's blockbuster, and once you stop thinking about the conceit you are watching an unrelated space adventure with a familiar name.

The film underneath is competent and oddly melancholy. Its best stretch is early: a pilot repeatedly flies a test that costs him four years of everyone else's life each time, and he comes back to find colleagues older, then married, then gone. For twenty minutes it is a real film about somebody who cannot stop trying to fix a mistake.

Then it becomes a team-assembly comedy with a robot cat, and the ending involves a version of the character fighting himself, which lands awkwardly in a story already built on duplicates. Chris Evans is fine and the absence of Tim Allen's voice was reported as a controversy and is, in practice, the least of it. Watch it last, or not at all.