The much-anticipated sci-fi film Project Hail Mary is out in theaters today. In it, light-eating alien microbes sap the sun’s energy, threatening life on Earth with extinction. To find a solution, an unlikely hero—a middle school teacher played by Ryan Gosling—is sent on a one-way mission to the star Tau Ceti and encounters an otherworldly sidekick nicknamed Rocky along the way.

Project Hail Mary is about a nobody who wakes up on a spaceship light-years from Earth with no idea who he is or how he got there.

It is an irresistibly enjoyable film, an impeccable marriage of ambitious filmmaking and Gosling’s solar-flare charisma.