What if running into an alien while far from home wasn’t necessarily terrifying? After decades of “Alien” movies (and their rip-offs) convincing us that deep space alien encounters end with bloody bodily destruction, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller suggest in their sweeping sci-fi weepie “Project Hail Mary” that there might be a new way to make chests burst — with love.

Friendly aliens aren’t a new phenomenon in movies, but usually, those friendships develop on our home turf of Earth. But in adapting Andy Weir’s novel to the screen, writer Drew Goddard combines two familiar genres: the “man alone in space” movie with the dog (or cute creature) movie, taking the maxim “who rescued who?” to new, previously unexplored heights.

Our future “man alone in space” is Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), an appealingly rumpled middle school science teacher, with a tousled blond mop and cute little glasses always hanging off one ear. In an efficient bit of exposition, he spends a class period explaining to his students (and the audience) that the sun is being eaten by a beam of “astrophage” that will slowly starve Earth over several decades. It’s a clever way for the film to quickly get us all up to speed, before Grace is picked up by a group of international feds who’d like to have a word with him.

In charge is Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a stern German tactician who is tasked with assembling a global coalition to handle the astrophage problem. (An international group hellbent on … saving the planet? Please try to suspend your disbelief). She’s interested in Grace because of a scandalous dissertation that got him tossed out of academia, and it turns out that he does have some useful ideas. He’s swiftly pressed into duty training the astronauts who will be sent on a mission to a far-off star for research and hopefully resolutions.

Yet Grace is the one who wakes up in space, and this story emerges nonlinearly, narrative flashbacks like bursts of memory ripping through his brain, discombobulated after a long intergalactic coma. He gets his bearings alone in a spaceship that also holds two dead crew members, putting the puzzle together and learning to survive on the ship, overcoming his panic and fear. Forced into bravery alone in space, there’s no time or space for self-doubt, only action.

Lord and Miller, known best for their charming and whip-smart animated films like “The Lego Movie” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” emphasize through style that “Project Hail Mary” isn’t like other sci-fi epics. Beautifully photographed by Greig Fraser, the color palette is warm and colorful, not cold and sterile; Daniel Pemberton’s percussive score is curious, bright and emotionally leading. Most of all, our millennial-coded hero Grace isn’t the usual stoic spaceman. He wears funny science tees and talks to himself and to his video logs in one-liners and self-deprecating jokes. He shrieks at a spacewalk. Even his suit is red, setting him visually apart from the sci-fi norm.

Grace is not alone for long. A huge, mysterious, Erector Set-looking ship pulls up alongside his ship and starts hurtling strange messages at him. Soon a tunnel between the ships, then a meeting, with a friendly, inquisitive alien who looks like a sort of craggy spider/crab, whom Grace dubs Rocky. Through dancing, gesture and sound, they start to communicate, but conveniently for us, Grace quickly devises a pattern recognition language system so Rocky can have his own voice (James Ortiz). The pair quickly bond over the fact that they both need to save their respective planets from astrophage, and decide to work together. Adventure, heroics and friendship ensue.

“Project Hail Mary” is an awe-inspiring sci-fi film that wants to make us feel — and feel good — more than it wants to make us ponder our existence. Themes of self-sacrifice dance around the script, but for a film that deals with such dark ideas as isolation and death in space, the film undermines its own pathos at every opportunity. Emotional rug-pulls arrive in the form of happy surprises that stretch the third act too long and test the limits of our disbelief.

That’s due to Weir’s source material, Goddard’s script, Lord and Miller’s consistently warm, amusing tone and Gosling’s appealing, if obvious, star turn. Hüller’s no-nonsense presence is the only astringent element to offset the goofy antics, and even she ultimately delivers an emotional karaoke version of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times.”

Executed with incredible craft and style and a whole lot of heart, “Project Hail Mary” verges on the edge of being too saccharinely sweet. But sci-fi can serve many different purposes for audiences, and maybe that sweetness, combined with a story of cooperation and collaboration for self-preservation, is just the kind of balm we need to take the edge off right now.

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'PROJECT HAIL MARY'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for some thematic material and suggestive references)

Running time: 2:36

How to watch: In theaters March 20

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