Starting off strong with an amnesiac scientist waking up on a spacecraft with two dead crewmates unable to remember who he is or what deep-space mission he’s been sent on, Project Hail Mary seems headed in the direction of dystopian sci-fi.

And indeed, that impression matches the premise of the film, which is about an unknown microorganism called Astrophage that’s attacking the sun, cooling it catastrophically and making the survival of life on Earth very doubtful. The scientist gradually recovers the basic idea that he’s on a desperate long-shot suicide mission to Tau Ceti, the only star unaffected by Astrophage, in order to discover its source of resistance to the deadly microorganism.

But then the movie pivots toward whimsical comedy with the devoted friendship that develops between the scientist on the spacecraft, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), and the alien on a similar mission from a distant planet called 40 Eridani whom he names “Rocky” in honor of its faceless, rock-like combination of blocky limbs and torso. And the tone shifts toward that of a family-friendly adventure tale, uneasily framed by a scenario of probable doom.

The probable doom part is clearly meant to resonate with our current terror of the various ways the United States is racing to destroy the world as we know it, whether by carelessly starting World War III or by allowing environmental collapse to accelerate us toward annihilation because it’s not profitable to homegrown billionaires to check it. In a supporting role, Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) plays Eva Stratt, the grim German in charge of the last-ditch attempt to save planet Earth, and she brings a welcome stone-faced adult sensibility to bear on the plot.

And Rocky, a complex puppet voiced by James Ortiz, along with Gosling at his goofiest, bring the comical whimsy.

This odd tonal combination is turning out to be a crowd-pleaser, with Project Hail Mary racing toward big-hit status right out of the gate. A consortium of pop-culture talent has gathered to make this happen. The film is based on Andy Weir’s eponymous, much-praised novel, with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — the team behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie, 21 Jump Street, and the Spider-verse franchise — in the director’s seat working from a script written by Drew Goddard (The Martian, World War Z, Cloverfield, Alias, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who also directed and cowrote the sleeper meta-horror hit The Cabin In the Woods. Looking over those credits, you can see the ingredients of kids’ movies, action-adventure, doomsday sci-fi, comedy for grown-ups, and a shot of horror all rolled together in a messy entertainment stew.

In order to pack all those elements in, Project Hail Mary is a very, very long movie at two hours and thirty-six minutes, especially since we spend most of that time in the company of Gosling and a puppet. Of course, the antics of the cutest puppet in the world are liable to grow stale over that long span of time. But Gosling’s spent all these years developing remarkable control over his movie-star charm, and he knows how to calibrate its excesses and keep you enthralled throughout.

I mean, for example, what to do about his ridiculous Ken Doll good looks? In this movie, they’re lightly disguised with spectacles and a dorky manner — hey, that Clark Kent disguise worked for Superman, didn’t it? This allows Gosling to pretend he’s not cloyingly handsome, and everyone pretends along with him.

It helps that he’s introduced in a semi-disgusting state, waking up from a yearslong coma with a ratty beard down to his chest, hacking up a breathing tube. Then he moves into screechy panic, followed by dull-eyed depression as he realizes he’s the only living being on the craft, drifting hopelessly through deep space.

And then the flashback structure begins — we move erratically back and forth through his present and his past as he gradually recovers his memory. We start the flashbacks with his mildly unkempt middle school teacher persona. It seems he was once a molecular biologist doing cutting-edge research, but he ran afoul of his academic superiors by dismissing their timid work in forceful terms, and teaching middle school is where he wound up.

But Grace’s former arrogance about his own work, plus his loner status, without family or significant other, makes him the ideal scientist for Stratt’s all-or-nothing team. I won’t reveal how he ends up aboard the ship for the actual suicide mission into space. It seems everyone knows going in that there will be only enough fuel to get to Tau Ceti, but not enough to return. The vital Earth-saving information is to be sent back by the doomed astronauts in adorable little round direct-mail probes.

As so often in these dystopian movie scenarios, the doom that comes upon the character(s) is actually the best thing that could’ve happened to them. Grace, the lonely misfit, finds his perfect mate in Rocky, and Earth, for all its wonders, can’t give him the sweetness, honesty, loyalty, bravery and scientific genius of Rocky the Eridian. Rocky has all the traditional virtues that have presumably gone missing on Earth, including monogamous devotion to a mate, whom Grace dubs “Adrian.” (Rocky and Adrian, get it?) Even when it comes to homosociality between a man and an alien, a female figure has to be wedged between them to reassure everyone there’s nothing too gay going on here.

At least the filmmakers acknowledge Earth’s wonders, for which I was grateful. There are extended montages of what we’re losing — sacrificing, rather, for the profit of several rich goons who want to be ever richer. The rocky beaches! The rolling tides! The sunlight through leafy trees! Not to mention very non-sci-fi music from the Beatles, Neil Diamond and a deep cut from Dennis Wilson’s solo album, This ain’t Interstellar (2014), with its Elon Musk point of view about how the Earth is well-lost if humanity can just recover our tough-minded pioneer spirit so we can go brutally colonize and lay waste to another planet.

So perhaps it’s not so strange that Project Hail Mary is getting embraced as a feel-good movie about our terrible plight on a dying planet. After all, the attack of the Astrophage ain’t our fault, so the blame for destroying Earth gets deflected onto alien microorganisms.

And how bad can things be as long as Ryan Gosling is bonding with that cute puppet?