For reasons perhaps only Catholic psychics can fathom, the Pope has frequently been in the news at the same time as Project Hail Mary has become a hit film. I wonder if the Pope has seen Project Hail Mary. I imagine he’d love this Catholic-sounding story about a Ken Doll named Grace riding a Popemobile in Space so he can save the world from eternal winter.

Of course, this science-fiction adventure isn’t Catholic at all, and the ship isn’t really a Popemobile — it consists of a trio of powerful, near-lightspeed rockets attached to a mobile laboratory that, when necessary, can convert into a centrifuge for artificial gravity. (Does the Vatican have that in its basement?) The story involves a long-distance attempt to save earth after a kind of cosmic bacteria starts eating away at the sun. There’s no “Hail Mary” football pass, but at one point the main character does have to catch a football-shaped chunk of solid xenon flung toward his ship. And that’s where the religious / sports references end.

I, an ordinary secular sinner, enjoyed Project Hail Mary the film more than I enjoyed the book. The book has 498 pages of long-winded scientific explanations, while the movie breezes by with two-and-a-half hours of engaging scenes. Compressing nearly 500 pages into 2.5 hours of comprehensible action takes a particularly buoyant shrewdness (bravo, editor Joel Negron). For comparison, The Shawshank Redemption was a mere 100-page story that also became a nearly 2.5 hour Catholic-sounding movie, and similarly climaxed with a scene of the protagonist crawling through a tube. Among other successes, Project Hail Mary’s creators know how to edit.

All last summer I waited for a copy of the book to work its way through my local library’s reservation system. When I finally got my clumsy paws on Andy Weir’s popular third novel (after The Martian and Artemis) and dug in, I found it to be an amusing if occasionally nutty page-turner. At times even Weir seems to be laughing at his creation, which is loaded with made-up jargon about star-eating bacteria that doubles as superfuel. One paragraph came so close to self-parody that I decided to take a picture of it:

After finishing the book, I couldn’t imagine how they’d make a movie of it. When the preview was released, it was exciting how good everything looked, with one caveat: It’s a shame to give away a revelation that doesn’t show up until more than 100 pages into the book. Chances are you already know, but if you don’t — see the movie. Otherwise, prepare to be spoiler-ized about a character who sounds like either a flying squirrel or Sylvester Stallone, but has neither fur nor an Italian face… nor even a face.

Credit for Project Hail Mary‘s enjoyability goes to screenwriter Drew Goddard and directing team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the latter two veterans of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street (and its sequel), and The Lego Movie — another long-shot concept that literally clicked together. Project Hail Mary mashes up numerous science-fiction tropes, refines the ingredients, and bakes them into a smorgasbord of tiny gourmet cakes. The overarching story, about a far-reaching quest to save the world from a rapidly diminishing sun, unfolds efficiently with one scene of problem-solving after another. The icing, squiggly applied throughout, is Ryan Gosling and his friendship with an alien that looks like a granite tick.

Ryan Gosling‘s easygoing charm has its own gravitational pull. In earlier movies I couldn’t quite like him — his combination scruffy Brad Pitt handsomeness and cockeyed Alfred E. Neuman mischief grin seemed to be holding in a double dose of smirk and smarm. But ever since The Nice Guys and the SNL sketch where he obsesses over the Avatar font (and its even funnier follow-up), Gosling has won me over. (Not to mention strong but more work in several other films, from Blue Valentine to Drive.) Gosling is the kind of guy who, after stealing your girlfriend without trying, you’d somehow find yourself high-fiving. That is, he’s hard to resent even when he seems like a brat. Some people have the knack and there’s nothing you can do about it. Which is why Ryan Gosling is the only actor who could pull off an entire movie performing opposite a dancing cairn.

As Project Hail Mary begins, Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, wakes up on a modernist hospital bed and has no idea where he is or why. The ZZ Top-bearded amnesiac stumbles around as an AI nurse pokes and prods him out of his coma hangover until he realizes he’s lost in space, and the room’s other two beds contain corpses. At this point you might have a flashback: Isn’t this how Planet of the Apes begins? Waking up from cryogenic sleep and your crewmates are dead? Why yes, it is. If you’re older and you’ve seen a lot of science-fiction movies, you’re going to have deja-vu all over again, and again. You’ll also find that Project Hail Mary moves so fast, you don’t have time to be irritated at its lack of originality. Plus the film’s younger audience won’t know, nor care, how much Andy Weir has cribbed. (To be fair, the story is very original about how brazenly unoriginal it is.)

Here’s a short list of influences: Saving earth via a search of nearby stars? See also: Interstellar. Tricky communication with an alien life form? Arrival comes to mind, as does Contact (for more reasons than one). A spacecraft that uses a centrifuge to simulate gravity? We’ll go back to 2001: A Space Odyssey for that one. Tethered-spacewalk mayhem? Mission to Mars, Event Horizon, and Sandra Bullock dodging debris in Gravity compare aptly. Escaped virus in a sealed room? Go back to Andromeda Strain, not to mention films like Contagion. The film’s ending recalls The Truman Show. And if you’ve seen Half Nelson, an early Gosling film where he plays a grade-school teacher, Project Hail Mary‘s flashbacks will give you….flashbacks.

Project Hail Mary leans hard into its pop-culture rehashing nature, dropping additional references to the Rocky movies and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I noticed that many of Andy Weir’s reference points had a -late1970s frame to them — he’s a Gen-Xer — and it strikes me that the late 1970s were also the time when Pet Rocks became a phenomenon. Yes, believe it or not, people used to buy rocks as pets. It was an actual thing. Project Hail Mary is sort of a fever dream of a little kid who wishes his Pet Rock could be real and he could meet it out in the galaxy. (The nerdiness of Project Hail Mary feels adjacent to the total dweebgasm of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, too.)

After Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, finally wakes up, smells the coffee, and realizes (ala Dark City, or Zathura) he’s in the black-coffee-middle of spacial nowhere, Project Hail Mary spends some time endeaering us to our hero by showing him shuffling around his cramped, three-level spacecraft like The Dude trying to find his stolen rug. Grace has amnesia and doesn’t know why he’s there, and the entire runtime of Project Hail Mary cross-cuts to a series of flashbacks that progressively explain not just what’s going on, but how a schoolteacher ended up the last hope for humanity. (If you’ve seen Contact, you’ll recognize the “understudy who becomes the lead after a disaster” pattern, though Project Hail Mary has a few extra surprises to keep the flashbacks from losing steam.)

I’d love to be able to say that Project Hail Mary makes complete scientific sense and has an airtight story, but in keeping with its pseudo-religious title, there’s quite a bit of plotting that you have to take on faith. Scientifically, the astrophage bacteria eating the sun doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, so the movie benefits from hurling past the details, which didn’t add up in the book even after pages of plausible-sounding gobbledygook. In The Martian, Andy Weir could make his well-read-layman explanations comprehensible to layman readers, but for Project Hail Mary he gives you just enough quantum banter so he doesn’t have to write “trust me, bro.” This works in the movie’s favor: It lets rapid-fire images do the talking, as well as the distracting.

The “Petrova Line” between the sun and Venus is basically a space rainbow between sources of hydrogen and an atmosphere loaded with C02. The astrophage bacterial gunk eats the hydrogen, uses the C02 to reproduce, and its waste product allows it to travel through space — or as Grace says to his students, it “toots to scoot.” In a flashback, we find out that Grace’s everyman teacher is also, improbably, both a microbiology expert and a published scholar on the speculative topic of non-carbon-based alien lifeforms. Which is like if a world-class juggler was also a record-holder in memorizing digits of Pi. But then Ryan Gosling gives a humble shrug and somehow it doesn’t matter.

One day as Grace is cleaning his blackboard, in walks Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a poker-faced Germanic woman with bodyguards and grimly humorless authority. She wants Grace to study the shining specks of astrophage and try to figure out what in the rave-glowsticks is going on. Aside from his abandoned past career, Grace’s real talent is in plucky problem-solving. In one sequence after another, Gosling figures things out like a laid-back MacGyver with extra can-do spirit. The first winning sequence, he enlists Stratt’s security officer (Lionel Boyce) to gather hardware supplies (duct tape, aluminum foil) to create total darkness — a box within a box. That’s where he learns to make the astrophage reproduce itself, and there’s a bit of movie magic when he turns three pinlights into four, all set to Daniel Pemberton’s upbeat music, which somehow fuses upbeat Carl Orff-like woodblock drums with heavenly Enya vibes: Polyrhythms and angels.

Soon Grace is a scientific VIP, whimsically barfing into airstrip traffic cones after being fighter-jet-rushed to a carrier in the middle of the ocean. The world’s scientists now want to mass-produce astrophage because it’s potent fuel for near-lightspeed travel. Project Hail Mary skips past a lot of subplotting, so viewers won’t know about the book’s very large array of sunlight-collecting panels in the Sahara Desert, or that Grace’s DNA has a rare, coma-surviving gene that makes him a prime-candidate cosmonaut for the multi-year slumber required to reach the only nearby solar system with a star that isn’t a snack for galaxy goop. Grace’s mission: To join a trio of of spacelab tinkerers seeking a solution to the earth’s impending (30 years till irreversibility) demise until the shrinking sun makes earth freeze over.

Project Hail Mary‘s central premise is bittersweet: It acknowledges the impending danger of climate change, but to do so it flips it in reverse and makes its cause external. Way back in 1961, the TV show The Twilight Zone had an episode called “The Midnight Sun” (Season 3, Episode 10) in which someone dreaming of a heating earth woke up to find it freezing. The 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow also flipped climate change such that it was rapidly freezing, with characters heroically outrunning cold fronts that chased them like gargantuans. It feels like Andy Weir’s premise embraces and denies climate change at the same time: Let’s pretend it’s the opposite and make it fun! There’s a hidden fantasy here: As the earth’s average global temperature rises year after year, wouldn’t it be nice if we could even it out by letting astrophage chow down on Solaris a bit? (Yes, it would, at least to those of us who aren’t pretending global warming isn’t real.)

While dodging the most pressing issue of our time by flipping it on its head, Project Hail Mary leans into its most inspiring element: Friendship. Spoiler alert, but any story about problem solving is better if there’s a buddy. Ryland Grace found one on earth (the security officer), and finds another in space when he meets an alien life form. Turns out earth isn’t the only civilization trying to figure out what’s going on; a type of ammonia-breathing, solid-xenon species called Eridians are making their own Hail Mary pass. Like Grace, only one of their ship’s crew has survived, and Grace names him Rocky for obvious reasons. Remember the rock monster in Galaxy Quest? Or the stacked rocks on the cover of 1996’s Rush album Test for Echo? Just imagine a faceless hexagonal crab with stumpy legs, and you’ve got Rocky.

Project Hail Mary‘s achievement is twofold: one, Ryan Gosling makes manipulating goo like a pastry chef really seem like he’s saving humanity; and two, the special effects team have made an endearing character out of something that resembles what would happen if E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial lost his head after looking at Medusa. The theme of the movie is that solving difficult problems can only happen by connecting with those who seem incomprehensible. The Eridians only see via soundwaves, their atmosphere is scalding Windex fumes, and their eating process resembles a turtle reclaiming explosive diarrhea from its bellybutton. Miraculously, the filmmakers make this cute anyway: Rocky builds his own habitrail in Grace’s ship, sways his hips like an igneous hampster-dancer, turns slang into embarrassing malapropism with “Fist my bump,” and becomes the cutest non-furry teddy bear in the known universe when he demands that Grace watch over him at bedtime. At last, the 1970s Pet Rock of Andy Weir’s childhood has come to life.

Project Hail Mary skips past even more book explanations, such as the jerry-rigged audio programs and databases Grace uses to translate Rocky’s language from percussion into words. Instead, the film gets busy with a series of problem-solving quests, one of which leads the duo to a solar system, called Tau Ceti, undamaged by astrophage. I wasn’t a big fan of the “dipping a miles-long scoop into a planet’s atmosphere to collect an air sample” sequence, which resembled a fishing boat trawling the ocean floor for dirt after one of the fisherman used arts-and-crafts skills to custom-build a dangling chain. But the effects team, along with cinematographer Greg Fraser, make that planet so pretty — swirls of green absinthe and pink tapioca, like the aurora borealis as hallucinatory jelly — complaining feels futile.

That scene, rapidly edited like so many before, makes me wonder: Do I understand this because I read the book, or would it have made sense if I’d gone into the movie cold? Some viewers I’ve spoken to were happy to assume it made sense while enjoying the film as a good-hearted spectacle. For a movie about a long football pass, the story punts quite a bit: The Eridians are anthropomorphic in most social ways, and wider-scale questions about astrophage eating the rest of the galaxy, or earth’s recovery process, aren’t addressed. Does it matter? Nah, not really, not when Ryan Gosling is bonding with zither-armed perky pebbles ala Jodie Foster at the end of Contact telling kids that a universe with no other life forms would be a “waste of space.”

I’d like to pause, once again, to marvel at what Gosling has done here, considering he probably acted opposite a tennis ball dangled in front of a green screen. His reactions bring Rocky to life, and though he’s hardly Laurence Olivier, I think I counted Gosling believably crying three or four times. I struggle to think of any other star in the same age range who could have pulled off what Gosling does here. Timothée Chalamet would have floundered. Tom Holland? Probably not him either. Michael B. Jordan? Gosling is the only one who could have done this — the only quarterback able to make this throw.

The movie has few others in its cast, but its choices are strong. Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub, seen in flashbacks, are the two others in the Holy Trinity of space researchers. Their casting becomes shorthand for the backstory of earthly cooperation, with Russian and Chinese involvement alongside the all-American hero. (I’m a fan of Vayntrub, best-known for some AT&T commercials but also supercute in the 2021 comedy-horror Werewolves Within.)

Especially strong, though, is Sandra Hüller as the HBIC of the entire civilization-saving operation. Hüller confirms the lonstanding belief of a few people I know: That if you want things to get done, find a female redhead. Hüller keeps Project Hail Mary‘s flashbacks from wandering, carrying an air of mystery that pays off when the backstory concludes. Hüller has few lines of dialogue, but she gets a lovely scene at a karaoke party, where she briefly lets down her guard of stiff authority while belting out a somber rendition of Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times.” In keeping with the title’s religious theme, Hüller is sort of the Virgin Mary ice queen to Grace’s sacrificial Christ figure. Perhaps Rocky is the Holy Ghost, doing a jig while asking us to fist his bump? I don’t know, I’m not religious. Maybe they resemble famous football players.