If there’s a common theme across Mamoru Hosoda’s work, at least of the films I’ve seen so far, it’s the idea of the fantastical invading the real, and the real adapting to accommodate it. Unlike most Ghibli films, which take place in worlds apart from reality or otherwise spirit their characters away from the real world, Hosoda’s films involve the real world itself being invaded by something outside the norm. And the characters’ ordinary lives pretty much keep trucking on as normal, acclimating to their new, fantastical circumstances without changing the core of how they go about living. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Wolf Children both center around this idea, observing how Mamiko and Hana’s lives both change and stay the same as a result of the bizarre situations they find themselves in. And if there’s a reason I don’t like Summer Wars nearly as much, it’s because the marriage of reality and fantasy here is far more uneven than either of those films. The grounded, down-to-earth human drama and the out-there, bonkers high concept influencing that drama don’t gel the way they need to, and the result is that it often feels like I’m watching two movies at once. Thankfully, both of those movies are damn good in their own right, so Summer Wars still ends up pretty enjoyable in spite of itself. But this is definitely the weakest Hosoda film I’ve seen thus far.

So, the first of Summer Wars’ two movies is the story of Kenji, your average socially awkward high school dweeb who spends most of his time playing games on line. Unexpectedly, he gets roped into helping his beautiful upperclassman Natsuki, and he agrees to travel with her out to the countryside for her great-grandma’s birthday party. You see, old granny’s the matriarch of one of those super huge families where everyone and their uncles and cousins lives in the same giant house. They’re a rowdy, rambunctious crowd, full of strong personalities and even stronger ties to their storied history as one of Japan’s longest-lived family lines. They’re also staunch traditionalists, and Natsuki promised her great-grandma that she’d introduce her to her boyfriend and future husband before she dies, despite the fact that she doesn’t actually, like, have a boyfriend. So she’s hired Kenji to play the part just until the party’s over, so her grandma can rest assured she’s leaving her family line in good hands. Kenji is understandably not prepared for any of this shenanigannery, but it’s too late to back out now. And over the course of about a week as the party preparations go on, he becomes privy to this family in all its squabbling, proud, messy glory, as well as all the long-unhealed wounds that keep them from truly coming together.

That’s one of Summer Wars’ storylines. The second storyline is about fighting a digital terrorist in an MMORPG to stop him from blowing up a nuclear power plant.

Yeah, now you’re starting to see how weird this movie is.

See, the “game” Kenji’s always playing is actually the OZ, a kind of all-purpose digital landscape where you can do business, play games, hang out, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Picture the OASIS from Ready Player One, except it’s still on consoles instead of VR. One night while he’s at the country house, Kenji answers a spam mail that accidentally causes a breach in the OZ’s security system, letting in a rogue AI that proceeds to start devouring the entire place whole. And since pretty much all the world’s major companies and governments have OZ servers to help run things, that means literally every single system of society is compromised. If the program isn’t stopped, it’s just going to keep breaking things until it causes a potentially extinction-level disaster. So Kenji has to enlist the help of the family’s reclusive gamer son, and eventually, the entire rest of the family, to fight off this danger from inside the digital world, which is represented as a fully immersive Apple Store-esque landscape upon which digital avatars punch each other and destroy the scenery around them like they’re in a cyberspace DBZ spinoff. The film’s titular war is one in which the old matriarch is a general, her sons and daughters soldiers, and the enemy a near-future sci-fi concept that forces the fractured family to come together in the face of adversity, restore their fractured bonds, and save the world by fighting as one loving, rambunctious unit.

And honestly, that’s not a bad idea for a film. In fact, what makes Summer Wars overall a good movie despite its flaws is how sincerely it tries to thematically tie these two halves together. The family is obsessed with tradition and lives in a huge, old-timey country house that’s bursting to the seams with history and connections, but it’s only by embracing the new rules of the digital world- embracing the future as personified by the youngest among them, who end up carrying them to victory- that they’re able to overcome their bad blood and work together. The internet isn’t presented as a force that tears families apart, but as a place of family in its own right, where you can forge connections and help each other in ways you couldn’t before. The old matriarch summons her endless web of friends and connections from every walk of life to rally against the digital threat, but the community of online players is just as essential to their eventual success. It’s a story of past and future coming together, future embracing the strength of the past and past embracing the possibility of the future. Only with both sides, the tech-savvy youngsters and the community-driven old-timers, is the war able to be won. And in the few moments those two halves are working in tandem, you can see the masterpiece that Summer Wars had the potential to be.

Sadly, for the most part, those two halves don’t mesh nearly as well as they need to. The stuff with the family and the stuff with OZ often feel like they’re fighting each other for screentime, and the result is that neither is as developed as they could be. The OZ system itself is overemphasized in the opening scene and talked about as if it could be a setting for an entire other anime all on its own, but in the story, it’s only ever important insomuch as it facilitates cool sci-fi cyberspace fight scenes. It’s revealed that the family actually has a connection to the cause of the rouge AI, but the twist is too easy to see coming and the character in question only gets the barest minimum characterization, so the emotional weight is lacking. There’s also the unfortunate problem that the two nominal leads, Kenji and Natsuki, are easily the blandest and least interesting characters in the movie, and their inevitable romance is as unengaging as you probably guessed. Not even Natsuki taking center stage for the final battle is able to save her from being little more than The Love Interest. None of this kills the film, but it’s all these little subpar details that keep it from shining like Hosoda’s work usually does.

Still, Summer Wars is far from awful, and the moments that work really do work. I love the kooky, rambunctious family dynamic, how true to life their closeness feels, how many charming little moments are packed into the margins (Hosoda remains, if nothing, a master of expressive character animation). This is far from his best work, but there’s still enough good here that I don’t mind the two hours I spent on it. Sometimes, that’s all you can ask for.