Remembering the Yellow Coat in Project Hail Mary

Reading farsite's "母の観たプロジェクト・ヘイル・メアリ―" reminded me that film responses still have this kind of doorway.

Project Hail Mary is the kind of work that almost forces people to talk about its setup. It is a film based on Andy Weir's novel, with an unknown cause draining the sun's energy, a mission fought with scientific knowledge as its main weapon, the loneliness of a spacecraft, and a crisis on a planetary scale. After watching it, it feels natural to move toward questions of orbit, life, energy, translation, and cooperation.

But what remains in the linked diary is not that. It is the color of space, and the yellow coat worn by Grace, played by Ryan Gosling. Not the logic that supports the large-scale setup, but the color that entered the eye, the outline of a person, and the slightly strange texture of a costume come first as memories of the film.

I think that is a fairly important way of seeing. The better a science-fiction film's setting is built, the more easily it pulls the viewer toward talking about that setting. But cinematic time is not made only of explanation. Warm color cutting into black space, the colder look of the Earth-side images, the way a yellow coat makes a person stand out: these things also carry the story.

Scientific satisfaction and visual memory belong to different layers. But they are not working separately. If Grace remains not only as an idea but as a body that is a little unfashionable, a little funny, and still impossible to lose sight of, part of that is the work of costume and color.

The more a work invites us to talk about its setting, the easier it is to miss the work being done outside that setting. Someone remembers the yellow coat in Project Hail Mary. That alone says the film is reaching people as a film.