Greg Berlanti’s Fly me to the Moon is just as confusing and strange as he tries to be all things to all people.

Each streaming service adopts its own film distribution approach. While Netflix stubbornly refuses to release its films in cinemas, Apple has chosen the middle road. With a theatrical release in the first few weeks, followed by a release on the Apple TV+ platform, the company hopes to benefit from the pros without the cons. A strategy that could work if the film is worth the trip. Unfortunately, that’s not the case this time.

Fly Me to the Moon, directed by Greg Berlanti, is a strange case of a film. A film that purports to be retro, but has all the hallmarks of a movie from 2024. Presented as a new, alternative version of the 1969 take-off and moon landing, the film quickly proved to be a rip-off. But this sentence is only valid if we consider that Fly Me to the Moon is associated with a single genre. In fact, it’s hard to see which territory our film is heading into. Comedy for a while, then shifting to drama, before taking a final turn towards period drama, you never know which foot you’re dancing on.

This problem inevitably spills over to our two protagonists. Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) and Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) share a chemistry that’s hard to justify without dramatic music in the background, while the previous scene had a comic tone. The overall tone is ambiguous, and while the performances oscillate between fair and average, the attractive overacting of Woody Harrleson and Jim Rash manages to make up for several scenes.

It’s clear that Greg Berlanti wants to return to old-fashioned cinema with Fly Me to the Moon, so much so that some scenes are straight out of a generic ’80s film. While the ambition to recapture the cinema of yesteryear in 2024 may be acceptable, the technical quality of the film betrays the rest. The image, sound and especially the direction—which is often serviceable—take us back to Hollywood perfectionism. The result is sometimes strange to look at, where the dialogues want to bear witness to an era, but the rest is quite different. While these dialogues could have had a vintage, charming feel to them, they often fall flat and become cliché.

This ambiguity is reflected in the film’s themes. With a running time of 2 hours 11 minutes, giving the impression of being 3, Fly me to the Moon attempts to raise the commercial and capitalist face of America in this space race. Berlanti is also heavy on the rhetoric of American superiority, and uses/romanticizes the 1960s period to lend cachet to his dramatization of events. It seems doubly vicious to have Kelly see Vietnam footage and then turn it into the main—and lauded—idea of the film. Adding an even more unsympathetic dimension to his character.

Fly Me to the Moon would surely have been a bigger hit if it had been released in American cinemas 30 years ago. But in the cinematic context of 2024, it feels like a poor attempt to seduce an audience that no longer turns out for these films. In the end, it’s a hybrid project that’s sometimes obnoxious, and mostly just passable.