This 2012 Channing Tatum classic explains Project Hail Mary's secret sauce

The seeds of Project Hail Mary were not planted in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's hit comedies from the 2010’s

Following in the trajectory of movies like The Martian, Interstellar, and Gravity, Project Hail Mary is another big-budget space epic bringing in millions at the box office. But unlike those other films, Project Hail Mary isn’t just a rock-solid space story, it’s also a hell of a good buddy comedy. The tale of a friendship between an astronaut played by Ryan Gosling and a rock-like alien may come as a surprise, but it makes sense when you consider who directed this movie.

Project Hail Mary is the first film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller in over a decade (assuming you don’t include Solo: A Star Wars Story, which they were hired to direct before before Lucasfilm replaced them with Ron Howard midway through production). Over the past decade, Lord and Miller have mostly shifted to writing and producing movies, including the Spider-Verse trilogy, but before that, they were perhaps best known as the guys who directed both 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street, which are some of the best buddy movies of the 2010s.

21 Jump Street began as a police drama back in the late 1980s and early 1990s starring Johnny Depp and a handful of others as young-looking undercover cops who pose as high school students to investigate drug and gang-related crimes. The movies, however, took the same premise and rebooted it as a buddy cop movie with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum.

The two meet in high school, where Hill’s character is a nerd while Tatum is a popular, moronic jock. They hated each other at the time, but end up becoming best friends seven years later when they’re both training to become police officers. They become partners, but after screwing up a case, they’re reassigned as undercover officers attending high school as part of the now-rebooted 21 Jump Street program (the films and show are set in the same continuity). Back in high school, a role-reversal occurs: Hill ends up getting in good with the smart, cool kids, and Tatum becomes the loser. In time, this tears them apart in typical buddy movie fashion before they come back together and save the day.

The sequel sees the duo on a similar case set in college. Many of the circumstances are the same as the first movie, but it works because of wall-to-wall meta jokes about the similarities and how neither Hill nor Tatum look especially young.

Both Jump Street movies are especially effective buddy comedies that lean into the tropes of the genre. The two characters are wildly different, but some set of circumstances forces them together (in this case, it’s basic training and being on the same assignment). They become best buddies, but their friendship gets tested at some point and they’re torn apart. In the end, though, they come back together.

Project Hail Mary does the same thing. While it deals with the isolation-of-space trope for the first third of its runtime, when Gosling’s scientist character — the lone survivor on a mission to a distant sun — encounters an alien ship with a solitary being on it, the two meet and discover that they’re there for the same reason. Both of their solar systems' stars are dying, so they’ve ventured to the nearest healthy star to find a cure.

This identical mission is the thing that forces them together. While a human scientist and a faceless rock creature are far more different than a nerd and a jock, they go through much the same path where they gradually become friends and help each other accomplish a shared goal. And while there’s no typical buddy movie “break-up,” those dramatic parallels can be found during more hazardous portions of their space adventure. (The duo eventually split up after completing their mission, before a final twist tests the limits of their unlikely friendship far beyond anything Hill and Tatum have to deal with.)

While it's worth noting that the friendship at the center of the story comes straight from the original novel by Andy Weir, it took Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s established buddy comedy chops to pull that dynamic off on the big screen. The result is a friendship you really root for, just like in the Jump Street movies — along with other classics of the genre like 48 Hrs., Tommy Boy, and Men in Black.

Honestly, it makes me wonder: if Lord and Miller had been allowed to finish Solo, would they have brought that same buddy movie dynamic to Han Solo and Chewbacca? While I don’t think anything could make Solo feel like it was a necessary Star Wars movie, an intergalactic buddy comedy sounds a lot more exciting than the paint-by-numbers predictable slog that Solo became in the hands of Ron Howard.