An opening title promises the film that inspired Toy Story’s Andy to acquire his Buzz Lightyear action figure. If that’s the case, Woody had nothing to worry about.

Watching Lightyear — a spin-off from the Toy Story franchise — it’s impossible not to pine for the years spanning the first three Toy Story instalments, a golden age when every Pixar movie felt like an event.

(We’ll politely refrain from discussing the superfluous fourth film in the same sequence.)

Lightyear may well feature the studio’s best opening gambit since Wall-E and Up, but the film quickly falls into, well, adequacy.

The plot is a game of two halves. Owing to pigheaded independence, the Space Ranger of the title (Chris Evans decently approximating Tim Allen) maroons himself, his commanding officer, and his crew on a hostile planet some 4.2 million light years from Earth.

Between fighting aggressive vines and native insectoids — picture a preschool-friendly Halo — Buzz attempts multiple hyperspace tests so that his stranded colleagues might find a way to return to their home planet.

Unhappily, during every voyage to infinity and beyond, Buzz’s black lesbian chum and commander (Uzo Aduba) ages, while he remains the same. (Said new character’s same-sex kiss has already seen the film banned in 14 countries and counting.)

It’s a solid sci-fi concept, one that has enlivened various episodes of The Twilight Zone and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. And then it gives way to an entirely different adventure, featuring a demographically diverse, bumbling gang of irregulars, a scene-stealing robotic cat (Peter Sohn), and Buzz’s traditional nemesis, Emperor Zurg (James Brolin). Everyone has a character arc to follow: Izzy (Keke Palmer), his former commander’s granddaughter, has to overcome astrophobia; Buzz, not for the first time, has to learn to play nice with others.

(In common with Top Gun’s Maverick, his summer blockbuster rival, Buzz is precisely the kind of lousy, insubordinate, individualistic military man who excels in the movie world even though he would never have made it through basic real-world training.)

There are some striking designs and a few hat-tips to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it all feels a bit perfunctory, like a successful launch that has no destination among the stars or anywhere else.

It’ll sell a lot of toys.