Movies too often use outer space as nothing more than a convenient setting for battles, explosions, and laser fights. The fabulously entertaining science-fiction movie Project Hail Mary offers something wholly different. It imagines space as a luminous yet mysterious backdrop for friendship, spiritual growth, and expressions of intergalactic empathy. Although, owing to its setting, the movie is jam-packed with the sort of sterile hardware associated with space travel — steel and screens and ladders and pods — watching it is akin to sinking into a big cozy sofa, one with all sorts of pockets and niches in which to lose popcorn and Junior Mints. It’s the most companionable space adventure movie ever made.

Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, first encountered while regaining consciousness after spending an indeterminate number of years in an induced coma aboard a spaceship. Confused about where he is, who he is, and what his mission could possibly be, Grace — he is consistently referred to by his surname, laced with theological implications — peppers the AI-powered, calm-voiced computer with questions like “Where are the living people?” and commands on the order of “Operation Go Home, in effect.” Alas, there is no such operation. 

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In fact, Grace is the last soul to draw a breath on the ship, which is christened the Hail Mary in a nod to the urgency of its mission. Some years earlier, the ship was launched into the cosmos to stave off the climate consequences of an organism that is literally dining on the sun. “It’s a small-to-medium whoop,” Grace, in his earlier vocation of middle-school science teacher, tells worried students, who live with the specter of a severely cooled world — with its attendant weather calamities, mass starvation, and economic collapse —........

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