Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary

Aliens have long been a target of human paranoia. Since the earliest days of science-fiction, aliens have been imagined as the universe’s great equalizers, come to Earth to destroy and punish humanity for being locusts upon our own planet. We imagine them incinerating great cities, toppling monuments, obliterating humans at scale. They show no mercy, they rarely speak, they just arrive and wipe us out, as we imagine in our shared cultural consciousness that we deserve. It is not a coincidence that beings from space come to destroy us were popularized just as the Industrial Revolution made possible war machines of inconceivable destructive force.

Rarely does Hollywood depict aliens as friendly creatures, but it does happen from time to time. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Contact, Arrival—sometimes aliens arrive to help us; to offer us some understanding of the universe we need to extend our own survival, usually in the face of environmental extinction. Project Hail Mary, adapted by Drew Goddard from Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, is one such friendly-alien scenario, except in this case, aliens don’t come to Earth. The meeting is entirely accidental.

Ryan Gosling stars as Dr. Ryland Grace, a disgraced academic thrown out of the halls of scientific advancement for standing by an unpopular thesis. He is now a middle-school teacher who wears a bright yellow rain slicker and cocks his glasses around one ear, so that we know he’s Quirky. Grace meets the world with humor and self-deprecation; some part of him has obviously never recovered from having his thesis so soundly rejected. Gosling has a huge task as an actor, as most of the film is him acting either alone on screen, or opposite a puppet.

When the sun is discovered to be dying, Grace’s unpopular thesis is suddenly relevant, and he’s thrust into the center of a desperate, worldwide scientific push to save the sun before cooling temperatures doom humanity to starve and freeze to death (the sun is our enemy! The moon is our only galactic friend!). The teacher setup allows Mary, directed by the duo of Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, to carry out enormous amounts of exposition with a modicum of elegance. At first, Grace can explain the sun predicament to his students. Then, as an outsider in the scientific community, everyone else can explain the rescue plan to him. It keeps the exposition from feeling burdensome, and even though an easy 60% of the film is exposition, it rarely feels like too much explaining is happening.

The film jumps between two timelines, with Grace alone in space, trying to figure out how to save the sun, and his memories of his life on Earth. With his memory scrambled by years of induced coma while traversing the breadth of the galaxy, Grace can’t remember who he is or what he’s doing alone in space, thus the flashbacks. Again, this allows Mary to break up scenes of Grace rambling around a spaceship alone with more active scenes of people on Earth doing stuff. Andy Weir, and by extension Drew Goddard, a pairing that previously produced The Martian, imagine the nations of Earth putting aside their differences to work together on a solution, an almost hilarious notion at this point.

But this is where Mary’s optimism shines the brightest. In space, Grace encounters an alien he dubs Rocky, because he looks like a boulder with spider legs. Rocky and Grace have arrived at the star Tau Ceti for the same purpose—to save their respective suns and thus, their planets and their people…or rock spiders, as it were. Despite the plot of the film revolving around a mission of discovery, despite a lot of technical jargon, and despite an obligatory scene of Grace and Rocky figuring out how to communicate, Project Hail Mary is not a “process” film. It is thoroughly a “friendship is magic” film.

Thematically, the film revolves around friendship and cooperation. The only way to save yourself is to save someone else, and Mary explores the depths of companionship under the most stressful of circumstances. Rocky is voiced and puppeted by James Ortiz, and the choice to have Rocky performed as a physical puppet, rather than a computer model, allows the rock spider to develop a tangible weight and presence in the world. A consistent library of movement builds body language that adds emphasis to Rocky’s words, and that weird little guy rapidly becomes a fully believable character with a rich inner life. When Rocky opines that he has not had enough time with his mate, it hits every bit as hard as if a human being were saying it.

Another lovely touch is that Rocky is not more advanced than Grace. In some ways, his civilization is obviously more advanced than humanity, but in others, Grace has an advantage of knowledge and ability. Their solutions come from meeting in the middle, and sometimes, neither of them has expertise and they have to do their best together. It’s a beautiful friendship born of desperation and loneliness, which evolves from finding commonalities in their experiences, even though Grace and Rocky could not be more different—literally, one of them is a rock spider. At times, Grace’s glib sense of humor is at odds with the emotional reach of the film, but he is usually effectively counterbalanced by Rocky, who does not perform sarcasm or insincerity. Their friendship brings out the best in each other, and the film itself.

While Project Hail Mary does not have the depth of films like Contact and Arrival, it does possess a big, warm heart fueled by friendship. It also has spectacular visuals, a smashingly good and fun use of miniatures, and mind-blowing sound design. Rocky’s native language is almost musical, and for this alone the sound would be brilliant, but the uses of silence and diegetic sound are also fantastic. Also, Daniel Pemberton’s score does some heavy lifting early on, particularly when Grace is either isolated, or trying to understand Rocky’s song-language, but it never becomes overbearing or overused.

It’s refreshing, at such a dark moment on the timeline, to see an alien movie that imagines friendship and cooperation rather than violence and destruction, and the film’s themes of sacrifice and devotion are grounded in an unlikely buddy comedy with real emotional heft. Mary will make you laugh, and cry, and believe that a rock spider is a man’s best friend, but if you’re looking for hard sci-fi about space, this is not the film for you. However, if you’re looking for a breathtaking cinematic vision anchored by optimism, hope, and friendship, Project Hail Mary has a lot to offer.

Project Hail Mary is now playing exclusively in theaters.