I thought I was too cynical to be charmed by the sci-fi adventure film Project Hail Mary, and with good reason. Just this week, I was looking at news reports about the progress of the real-life space adventures of Artemis II, which in its first few days produced photographic documentation of the dark side of the Moon while traveling further from Earth than any astronauts have previously gone, and my first thought was “Wow, what a waste of resources.” Why are we spending so much money on space travel and moon colonization research when those same funds could be used to immediately house, feed, and medicate people who are struggling on the planet we already inhabit? Basically, I had a full Gil Scott-Heron moment, too knee-jerk cynical to appreciate the wonders of “Whitey” orbiting the Moon. So, how could I hope to be charmed by the outer space adventurism of Project Hail Mary, which spends its entire 156min runtime forcibly cramming that same sense of wonder into its audience’s skulls? Well, it’s helpful that it’s a work fiction, one that can create immediate, dire stakes that make an exploratory mission into outer space immediately necessary to save human lives back on Earth. Even more helpfully, its heaping helping of Hollywood schmaltz is delivered via one of the most charming actors of our time, so that it doesn’t matter how cynical you are about the exorbitant expense of space travel; it just matters whether you personally find Ryan Gosling funny.

Gosling stars as an unassuming middle school science teacher who wakes up dazed & alone on a long-distance space mission, unsure how he became an astronaut. In a dual timeline structure, we learn the history of how he got there and the future of what he can achieve, both related to a mysterious substance that is threatening the continuation of life on Earth by dimming the Sun. In both timelines, he teams up with a hard-to-read scientific genius that he must learn how to communicate with in order to functionally collaborate: an Earthbound human played by Sandra Hüller and a fellow space-traveling alien creature played by a puppet, shaped like a collection of rocks. In both timelines, the plot is entirely constructed of problem-solving scientific experiments, breaking down the grand mission of returning home safely after saving the Sun into a series of simpler, less daunting puzzles. The scientific specifics of these sequential experiments seemingly don’t mean much to directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller, who find more inspiration in the source novel’s broader themes of the bravery that ordinary people can find in the grimmest of times, as long as they have a reason to hope & dream. If that sounds a little hokey, it’s because it is, and composer Daniel Pemberton frequently scores the film like he’s working on an allergy medicine commercial about a stuffed-up suburban mom who can finally enjoy life because she can breathe again. However, just because it’s hokey doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, which is something I should probably keep in mind the next time the world goes gaga over a rocket launch.

The space-exploration adventurism of Project Hail Mary is ultimately secondary to its person-to-person social interactions, charting Gosling’s transformation from an isolated misanthrope to humanity’s bravest soldier. He starts the film wary of people as an abstract idea, but he’s continually won over by his fellow scientists on a one-on-one basis, and it’s consistently charming to watch him warm up to the concept. He’s an overly chatty fella for someone who doesn’t like attention, and the movie essentially asks him to put on a one-man show against screen partners figuratively or literally made of stone. Gosling makes warmth & humor look effortless, getting so cozy in his oversized sweaters that his eyeglasses eventually hang entirely off his face as he pleads his case. Meanwhile, Sandra Hüller is expertly humorless, playing icy straight man to his charming schlub shenanigans. It’s a shame that the narrative’s dual timeline structure limits how much of their onscreen chemistry we get to see here; they’d kill in an Old Hollywood screwball throwback where their warm-and-icy dynamic clashed at feature length. Thankfully, though, Gosling also has a great rapport with the rock puppet, conveying a genuine enough sense of friendship that I was occasionally moved to tears by their mutual kindness (despite the fact that there’s technically only one actor onscreen during their scenes). In short, Ryan Gosling can charm anyone, no matter how tightly our arms are crossed at the start.

I should be clear that I don’t actually believe that exploratory space missions like Artemis II are a waste of public resources (at least not compared to even more egregious wastes on police & military weaponry). There are plenty of online articles around explaining how past space missions have led to scientific developments like solar power, water purification, prosthetic limbs, heart pumps, and various other technologies that benefit humans back on Earth. Even in Project Hail Mary‘s all-important mission to save our dying Sun, Gosling’s ship is equipped with smaller experiments in the background studying plant growth and other mundane processes. My initial animal-brain response to these far-reaching space missions just happens to be a cynical one, and then I have to be reminded why they matter in the bigger picture. Project Hail Mary‘s success is in the way it translates that bigger-picture space research through more intimate, humanist concerns. Ryan Gosling’s unremarkable schoolteacher protagonist is on a mission to save all of humanity, but all of the emotional beats in that story are narrowed down to how he interacts with the person immediately in front of him, whether they’re from Germany or from an alien planet. It’s practically a workplace comedy in that way, a sitcom where Gosling’s job is doing science and his favorite coworker is a talking pile of rocks.

-Brandon Ledet