Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Project Hail Mary
2026 · Phil Lord · Project Hail Mary on Sightlines
Ryland Grace wakes up, and the frame is tall. The ship around him fills a 1.43:1 IMAX picture, close to square, crowded with cables, equipment and the improvised fixes of a machine people actually work in. He doesn't know his name. Later, when pieces of his life on Earth come back, the picture shrinks to a letterboxed widescreen strip. The cinematographer Greig Fraser and the directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have reversed what you'd expect. The cramped ship gets the huge, immersive frame. The open Earth is pressed flat into the past.
That switch is the best way into this film with Gilles Deleuze, because it shows what kind of film Project Hail Mary is, and what kind it decides not to be.
In his two cinema books, Deleuze divided film into two regimes. In the first, the movement-image, a character takes in a situation and acts to change it. Seeing leads to doing, and each cut links a cause to its effect. In the second, the time-image, that chain breaks. Characters land in situations they can't act on. They wander, watch and remember, and time stops being the measure of what happens and comes forward as a thing in itself.
On paper, this film opens like a time-image film. A man with amnesia, alone in a sealed room light-years from home, unable to say who he is: that is the stranded watcher of modern art cinema, the figure Deleuze called the seer. What makes Project Hail Mary interesting is how quickly it turns the seer back into someone who acts. Grace doesn't drift. He reads.
Deleuze describes a "small form" of the action-image, where an action or a clue uncovers a situation that was hidden. The clue he calls an index of lack: a detail that points to something you can't see. The ship is made almost entirely of these. Its instruments, its layout and its supplies are the exposition. Grace works out his mission from the walls around him. Lord and Miller built the interior as one continuous set, modeled on the clutter of the International Space Station, so Gosling moves through a real space and the clues have somewhere physical to sit.
Around that small form sits a large one. The sun is dimming. Deleuze's name for this kind of all-encompassing pressure is the synsign: a whole milieu that bears down on a hero until he acts to change it. The film puts one form inside the other. Each solved puzzle reveals a bit more of what's hidden, and each reveal raises the stakes of the big problem.
Memory is where the aspect ratio does real work. Deleuze separated two uses of the past. In the time-image, the past is a territory you get lost in, layers of memory with no clear way out. The other kind he called the recollection-image: the flashback that marks off a dated, former present and sends you back to now carrying information. Grace's memories are firmly the second kind, and the scope frame fences each one off, so you always know where you are. Joel Negron's editing treats them as fuel. Each return to Earth changes what Grace's work in space means, and each step forward in space sends him back for the next piece. The past never swallows the present here. It feeds it.
Watch the light, too. The ship runs on a daily cycle: cool blue in the morning, warmer in the evening, dim tungsten at night, faint ultraviolet while Grace sleeps. The film writes time into the lighting like a clock. That is time in the movement-image sense, the measure of a working day, the pace of a job. And the shape of the frame, which Deleuze treated as a closed system of information, becomes a timestamp.
Then there is Rocky. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up: a face that registers a feeling before it turns into action. He argued that a close-up can give almost anything a face, as long as there's a surface that receives and an intensity that expresses. Rocky has no face and no eyes. Fraser lit the creature so it wouldn't come across as menacing, and that is the affection-image problem worked out as a lighting problem. How do you let an audience read feeling in something with no face? Their answer was physical. James Ortiz performed a puppet built from servo-driven animatronics and rods, on set, able to react to what Gosling did. Several reviewers said Rocky felt like a presence rather than a rendering.
That choice also places the film in an older argument. André Bazin, the critic who most shaped thinking about cinema's realism, held that film's power came from the camera recording what was actually in front of it. Building the ship whole, lighting against blackouts instead of LED volumes, hanging Gosling on wires: in a virtual-production era, that is a Bazinian bet. It isn't a purist one, since ILM built the space environments and the wires were painted out. But light really fell on faces in camera, and the film is built on that.
The film knows where it comes from. Apollo 13 gave it the grammar of working the problem, where improvising a fix from the parts on board is the climax. The Martian, from the same author and the same screenwriter, Drew Goddard, supplied the wisecracking competence of a man talking himself through physics, which is how a man alone can keep acting on screen. From 2001 it takes the non-human intelligence shown through formal restraint. Close Encounters made sound a medium of contact, and Contact made decoding a step-by-step procedure. Arrival, its nearest sibling, made the labor of translation the plot itself. Daniel Pemberton's orchestral score with choir points the same way: a big, open feeling that pushes against the cramped interior and tells you how to feel about the strangeness Grace faces.
What Project Hail Mary adds to that line is a test. It takes the materials of the time-image (amnesia, isolation, a being with no face) and asks whether the old, optimistic chain of seeing, understanding and acting can hold them. For 156 minutes it says yes. Contact with another species becomes one more problem to work, and friendship gets the same patient procedure as the physics.
So here is a question to watch with. When the seer turns back into an actor, what does the film give up, and what does it get? On a rewatch, notice where the frame's edges sit, when the light turns blue, and how much feeling a faceless creature can carry once someone has lit it with care.
Concepts in play
- Action-image, small form — Grace learns his mission from the ship itself. Its instruments, layout and supplies are the exposition, and each of his actions uncovers more of a hidden situation.
- Index of lack — The continuous, ISS-style cluttered set is made of details that point to a situation Grace can't remember (why he's there, what the mission is).
- Synsign (the encompasser) — The dimming sun is a global situation pressing on the lone hero until he acts to change it. The large form contains the small-form puzzles.
- Recollection-image (mnemosign) — Earth memories of Grace's recruitment come back in fragments, each fenced off by the widescreen scope frame. Negron's cut uses each one to reframe and drive the present action in space.
- The frame as closed set — The switch between the 1.43:1 IMAX frame (present, ship) and scope (past, Earth) makes the frame's shape itself carry information, a timestamp that replaces title cards.
- Affection-image — Rocky has no face or eyes. Fraser lit the creature so it wouldn't read as menacing, and Ortiz's on-set servo-and-rod puppet reacted to Gosling, letting feeling register on a non-face.
- Movement-image — The circadian lighting cycle (blue morning, warm evening, tungsten night, UV sleep) makes time the measure of a working day. Time stays subordinate to action throughout.