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.