I’ve been goofing on this film since it came out. I mean, look, it rocketed up the IMDB top 250 ahead of Jaws, Raging Bull, The Big Lebowski and Fargo, Citizen Kane and Rocky—this last film being relevant, as we’ll see later. The author is Andy Weir, who gave us the abysmal Artemis, which the directors of Project Hail Mary are doubtless feverishly developing as I write this. The Martian, in Ridley Scott’s hands, was pretty forgettable (at least to me). And the directors of this flick, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, I recalled from them being pulled off of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Though I guess they’re enjoying a good smug “We Told You So” over that fiasco.

Lord and Miller actually have a pretty solid track record: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, and 21 Jump Street.

What I expected was a basically respectable but overlong flick with grating Marvel humor and an exhausting reliance on pre-existing cultural artifacts.

What I got was much better. The Boy was fairly enthused, and while I was less so, I would say I enjoyed it overall. So let’s count the ways this is good.

PHM relies heavily on Ryan Gosling’s charm. As Ryland Grace, middle school science teacher, he’s kind of a loser and a goofball, and we learn his previously more prestigious life came to an end when he promulgated the theory that life could emerge even in the absence of water. It’s this that gets the attention of Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller, Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall) who suggests that Grace can be of help to Project Hail Mary.

See, the Earth’s sun is being eaten by astrophages, and it turns out all the other suns in the immediate vicinity are also being eaten except Tau Ceti, a mere 11.9 light years away. So Huller helms the project to visit the system to figure out if there’s a cure for astrophages, essentially.

Grace, as mentioned, is a goofball. He barely wants to be involved. We spend most of the movie trying to figure out why anyone would send him. And I have to say, the third act reveal is truly great. It’s almost zany, but it treads very deftly between serious and comic. Gosling’s charm is critical here.

But the movie does tone-switching very well, which is not something Western movies do well. (Eastern films pull it off very regularly, which probably says something about something.)

In practice, what this means is that the expected Marvel-style humor doesn’t grate like I thought it would. The quips are fast and the movie doesn’t pause awkwardly for laughter—which is good, because not all the jokes land, of course—and they’re largely not brought out to defuse heavier moments. There’s also good physical comedy, good fish-out-of-water comedy, and so on.

Grace becomes sympathetic and stays sympathetic, which is critical. When he wins over his handler, Carl (Lionel Boyce), it feels earned. This allows the movie to show Carl coming up with the first breakthrough without it feeling like pandering, and Grace to show some, y’know, grace. Carl is one of many minor characters who feel fleshed out and more real than, well, most movies in most modern Hollywood films.

Ultimately, though, this is the Gosling show with special guest star: A rock puppet, puppeteered (in part) and voiced by James Ortiz. The two develop a relationship that feels real, and since Rocky can’t emote much directly, his words and actions have to convey his side of the story to us. (The Pixar lamp has it easy compared to Rocky.)

I thought the actual space scenes looked weird—in the sense that I felt like they could’ve made things more “realistic” looking—but I didn’t really mind it as the art and set direction had a particular aesthetic, and the CGI conformed to that. I much prefer “aesthetic” to “real”, as I’ve often said.

The cultural references are there, of course, but presented in a non-grating way. The movie is canny enough to provide excuses for the goofy montages that would otherwise be tension-deflating. Like, “we need to visit this planet 11 days away, let’s kill time with a montage!”

Also canny: Having a technically proficient alien able to do things Ryland wouldn’t have the faintest chance of being able to do.

There are good action scenes and suspense pretty much throughout.

Best big new release? Sure, there’s not much competition. In the top 100 films of all time, no, not even close.

First, it’s 2:36 minutes long. That’s about 20 minutes too long. And there are four endings. While I appreciated the way they turned out, the second one, where Grace rescues Rocky, comes dangerously close to nullifying the whole mission. I get why they did it—because the fourth and final ending is heartwarming—but I will curmudgeoningly say no. But if they had to keep all this stuff in, they could’ve trimmed some of the “majesty of space” shots.

Second, the First Contact scene has Rocky throwing a large thermos-sized object across space for Grace to catch. Though there’s no chance you could see such an object, and why not just light it up? (There are potentially story reasons for that, but I don’t know why they would take precedence over “No way could a human see it.”)

But most of all, a big part of the plot is Grace turning astrophages into fuel, and the emotional hook is he can’t go home because he won’t have enough fuel. Even though the entire crux of the problem is that the astrophages are everywhere. By the quadrillions. Floating in big rivers through space. I wanted to ignore that one, but it serves as no fewer than two emotional hooks.

There were a few things like that, but they didn’t detract too much. It’s almost like classic Spielbergian. Manipulative, showy, and about as subtle as a jackhammer. But this is not bad. This is…movies.