The premise behind Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out is the kind of fluff you’d see on the Disney channel back in the day. It starts as the kind of PG, family friendly fare that is only slightly about science fiction and more about outcast kids coming together. And while the narrative takes a turn into real, emotional stakes towards the middle of the film, it unfortunately falls apart right where it needed to pull everything together. The end result is a mishmash of tropes that almost subverted its goofy premise.

In a cold open, a young Calvin (Thomas Cummins) and his father Cyrus (Will Forte) excitedly set up their telescope to capture the Jesper comet, which zooms through the sky above the town of Pebble Falls once every ten years. It’s almost time for the comet to pass when Cyrus goes back into the house to talk to his wife, missing the comet. But then loud noises and flashing lights happen, Cyrus yells for Calvin and then the poor kid is left alone. Both of her parents have vanished as Calvin sees bright lights in the sky above him.

Cut to ten years later and a new family comprised of mother and father Wendy (Hailey Smith) and Nelson (Matt Biedel) and their two kids Itsy (Emma Tremblay) and Evan (Kenneth Cummins) are relocating to Pebble Falls to flip a dilapidated house. Itsy is very upset about uprooting her life and her friends to go to the middle of nowhere. She’s a photographer and wants nothing more than to escape the small town and go somewhere big, like New York City. During their first day of school, Itsy has a run-in with the popular girl Heather (Landry Townsend) and Pebble Falls’ resident weirdo, a now ten year older Calvin (Jacob Buster), who arrives to class wearing an astronaut suit.

Calvin is the kind of kid you see in these types of movies. He’s conventionally attractive and in the real world his kookiness would be ignored because of his curls and charming smile. But here, he‘s the social pariah of the school who uses coconut oil and squid ink to slide into his astronaut suit.

Once Heather discovers that Itsy is both a photographer and wants to be a journalist, she approaches her with a killer deal. Turns out Heather is the head editor of the young journalist club at school and there’s this competition where the winners will attend a summer writing program in NYC. The topic for the competition? The strangest thing in your hometown…which of course is less a “thing” and more a “Calvin.” Seeing an opportunity to use the new girl to get close to Calvin, Heather offers to join forces with Itsy and share the article…as long as Itsy can get a good story.

You know how the rest of this story will presumably play out, as Itsy jumps at the chance to escape Pebble Falls, her parents and her brother, only to discover that Calvin is more than just the weirdo in town. Complications will arise, and if you’ve ever seen She’s All That you probably know some of the major plot points Aliens Abducted My Parents will play into. And you’d be mostly right, except that the narrative by Austin Everett does go to some very real and emotional places along the way.

Towards the midpoint of the film, Aliens Abducted My Parents subverts some expectations as what started as a goofy feel good kids’ movie finds thematic depth in its characters and a boy who wants to know why he was left alone. While it still hits the expected beats inherent in the tropey narrative, this moment hit harder than I expected it to.

Unfortunately, once it hits that thematic high it starts to falter a bit as the more goofy nature of the film moves back into the foreground of the story. Once it finally reaches the climactic moment, it falls apart into pure silliness, as if the story didn’t want to linger on the more emotionally raw moments. It’s a shame because the way the middle section moved past the usual trappings and went for something meaningful quickly changed my experience with the film…only to have it completely 180 that feeling and end with the most eye-rolling sappy ending imaginable. It’s not an egregious movie and it does have some heartfelt things to say, but boy that ending sure was dumb.