Review: Y2K (2024)

Y2K (2024)

Rated R for bloody violence, strong sexual content/nudity, pervasive language, and teen drug/alcohol use

Score: 3 out of 5

The '90s have become for my generation what the '50s were for my parents' generation. It's funny, given that I still remember movies like Pleasantville and Blast from the Past that were actually made in the '90s and presented the '50s as the utter antithesis to such, an era of wholesome family values and patriotism versus the decadent and depraved times in which a lot of people believed we were living back then. (Or, alternatively, stories like Fallout and -- again -- Pleasantville that explored the flip side of this, depicting the '50s as an era of authoritarianism and social repression that probably shouldn't be romanticized.) And yet, while the finer contours of '90s nostalgia are obviously different from those of the '50s, framing it not as a time when people were more morally upstanding but one where they were cooler and more chill, the broad strokes are similar: it was a more innocent time when everybody more or less shared the same values and most of society's "real" problems were assumed to have been solved.

And just like the '50s, everybody has a theory as to where it all went wrong and the dream of the '90s fell apart. People on all corners of the political spectrum have used this question for partisan ax-grinding, to say nothing of the impact of 9/11, but one rather apolitical theory that I'm partial to is that the internet was what killed it. The subject of breathless hype at the time (and well into the next two decades) from hacker and techie culture and the nascent Silicon Valley tech industry about how it was gonna revolutionize the world and bring us into a new golden age, its actual consequences for society have been far more of a mixed bag. On one hand, it empowered previously marginalized voices and let them speak truth to power, allowed academics and niche communities to network and share their ideas, and allowed independent artists and journalists to cut out the middleman of an often extortionary mainstream media and entertainment industry. On the other hand, however, it also elevated unhinged conspiracy theorists, hostile foreign powers, and rank bigots, allowing them too to network and spew retrograde, anti-intellectual garbage, all while the shared culture that we had dissolved into a mass of subcultures and the tech industry slowly but surely became a corporate behemoth even worse than the "legacy media" it displaced.

It's this theory that the movie Y2K, in its better moments, is sympathetic to and tilts towards. It's a movie about the worst predictions about the Y2K bug coming to pass and then some, in the form of a sentient AI computer virus that hijacks everything with a computer chip in it in order to exterminate humanity. It's a very dumb and silly movie whose presentation of computer technology is laughably inaccurate to the point of explicit parody, and whose sense of humor is overreliant on '90s pop culture references and plot points lifted from other, better teen movies. Fortunately, once the plot gets rolling it finally finds its footing, still a pretty dumb and silly movie but one that manages to tread the line between a farcical horror/comedy spoof of that period in time and an exploration of our relationship with computer technology. It felt like a movie made for people like me who remember not only the hype surrounding the Y2K bug but also the broader pop culture and aesthetics of the time period, and while I feel that there were a lot of ways in which it could've cut much deeper than it ultimately did, it still hit the spot as pure, empty-calorie cheez whiz, a fun throwback that does for the late '90s what Stranger Things does for the '80s.

The worst parts of the movie are unfortunately front-loaded, with a teen comedy plot that's mostly a second-rate retread of Superbad (whose star Jonah Hill produced this) but with characters who aren't half as interesting. On December 31, 1999 in the anonymous American suburb of Crawford, high school loser buddies Eli and Danny decide to crash a New Year's Eve party that their rich jock classmate Chris is throwing at his place, largely so that Eli can ask out Laura, a friend of his who he has a crush on. The big problem is fundamentally one of asymmetry between its male and female leads. Rachel Zegler is charming and charismatic as Laura, but unfortunately, I could not say the same about Jaeden Martell as Eli. This film's protagonist may as well have been a blank slate, a generic "cool loser" of a sort we've seen in countless teen comedies before who's motivated purely by a desire to get laid, and neither the writing nor Martell's performance do anything to elevate him. While Laura is the one who actually figures everything out and drives the plot forward in the second half of the film, and she was clearly having fun doing its spoof of Hackers towards the end, it still asked me to treat Eli and his quest for Laura's love as a story on equal footing with such even though I couldn't be bothered to care about it. If it were up to me, I would've switched around Laura and Eli when it came to their importance to the film. Spend more of the first act focusing on Laura not just as the cute "girl next door", but also as the computer whiz who designed her school's web page. Have her get an inkling early on that the Y2K bug might not be as much of a nothingburger as everybody thinks, so as to build up some tension in the first act. Keep Danny, because he was pretty entertaining as the comic relief who embarrasses our protagonist in front of the cool kids, but have him be Laura's friend in addition to Eli's (maybe he's part of the computer club with her?) so that his arc affects her as much as it does him, the two of them even perhaps bonding over it. Don't make Eli the hero, make him the love interest, a well-meaning guy who Laura initially finds cringy but eventually warms up to as he proves himself. As it stood, though, half this movie's story felt like the most basic, boilerplate teen sex comedy I could imagine, and after a certain point I was just waiting for the real action to start.

It's a good thing, then, that once this movie gets to that point it picks up admirably. As the title suggests, the Y2K bug arrives at the stroke of midnight, and it does far more than just knock out the power. No, it's a sapient, malicious AI computer virus that takes over everything with a computer chip in it, from actual computers to RC cars to microwaves to Tamagotchis, and uses it to try and kill humans like in Maximum Overdrive, with various hijacked objects eventually coming together into humanoid, mechanical monsters. The party turns into a very fun bloodbath full of creative kills, and both the violence and the killer robots are done with gnarly practical effects. It's never a particularly scary movie, but it is a very fun joyride, with the supporting cast getting far more room to shine. Fred Durst shows up as himself, the movie making all the requisite jokes about Limp Bizkit but also clearly having an unapologetic affection for the much-maligned nu metal band, especially when Lachlan Watson's "rebel" chick Ash meets him. The subplot with the off-the-grid stoners who call themselves the Kollective was an amusing diversion that fed nicely into the themes of the story, which the film doesn't beat you over the head with but which are readily apparent if you're paying attention. You see, the Y2K bug doesn't want to wipe out humanity, but wants to enslave them, implanting chips into everybody's heads in order to use their brains for processing power while trapping their consciousnesses in a digital realm, like a version of The Matrix that went much heavier on the retro '90s internet aesthetics. After all, we've already outsourced plenty of our decision-making to technology and have grown more and more dependent on it, so it may as well make our enslavement to the internet official. The Y2K bug itself, presented on various screens as a polygonal digital being straight out of The Lawnmower Man, is one of my favorite characters in the movie, a foul-mouthed, malicious creature that holds nothing but naked contempt for the stupid, lazy meatbags that make up most of the human race, like if Bender from Futurama decided to turn evil one day. The science fiction side of this film's comedy was far better than the teen sex romp it started out as, making me wish that the film had leaned that much further into it, its teen movie homages being less a throwback to American Pie and more a spoof of WarGames and Hackers.

The Bottom Line

Y2K was a movie that didn't know what its best qualities were, especially early on, but once it got going it became a fun nostalgia trip of a sci-fi horror/comedy, even if I will admit that my own personal affection for the era of my childhood probably caused me to like this more than I should've. Consider this a qualified recommendation for children of the late '90s and early '00s.