Y2K

On the last night of 1999, two high school juniors crash a New Year's Eve party, only to find themselves fighting for their lives when the terror of Y2K becomes a reality, and machines suddenly rise up against humanity.

Taking place on New Year’s Eve, 1999, right on the cusp of the new Millennium, right when the fear that a computer glitch (due to a 2 digit year date within their base programming, instead of a 4 digit year date) would result in an apocalyptic crash of society at the start of the new year, had the world in a grip of terror, Y2K starts out as a familiar “A pair of nerds are looking to party, one to finally get the popular, smart, and beautiful girl of his dreams, and the other to hopefully just get laid” teen comedy movie, with all the usual tropes and jokes one would expect...

But then the ball drops.

The teens all slam into each other, slobbering all over each other’s faces, a sudden deluge of mostly over-the-clothes heavy petting in some random parent’s TV room, all while 6 Underground by Sneaker Pimps plays.

And then everything shuts down.

The lights go out. Planes fall out of the sky. Computers go offline. Satellites shut down. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and no one feels fine about it. Even worse, every piece of consumer electronics suddenly comes to life, driven by a self-aware computer virus to begin to lash themselves together in the most optimum way they can in order to kill every ugly meat-sack of a human being they can find. Forced to flee into the apocalyptic night, a disparate group of teens try to survive, all while being hunted by ad-hoc robotic killing machines.

It’s basically Can’t Hardly Wait meets Maximum Overdrive, or maybe, American Pie, and then when the clock strikes midnight, it becomes Terminator: Day One. But with teenagers. Also, the Terminator is kind of like a giant demon Teddy Ruxpin with no fur. There’s also a little bit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ID4, and Johnny Mnemonic thrown into the mix, too, all of which is mostly utilized to show us that humanity and the internet do have one thing in common after all… we’re both stupid.

Also, condoms save lives, kids.

And in the end, it‘s… fine. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely not good. It’s not even “bad, but the kids love it” good either. It’s yet another “fine and forgettable” film.

Still, I did really like how, while the characters are all clearly outlandish and exaggerated archetypes and easy cliches, they’re also shown to be children who are simply wrapped up in whatever particular clique they identity with, whatever bit of pop culture they love, and while, yes, it’s generally jokey, the story still takes them seriously as people, it respects them as characters, so that was nice. Through this, maybe the one thing the film does well, is that it shows how important pop culture can be to a person. The film illustrates how pop culture can speak to a person, how it can provide deeper meaning to someone, especially when they might be stuck in a mediocre and unremarkable world. It shows how pop culture can provide a kid, not just with an identity, and a path to discovering who they might be, but it can also bring them a social circle, a found family, a support network, and even a guide for living their life, all this, even though the rest of the world sees it as shallow and meaningless pap. So, while Y2K is obviously a story about pop culture at the turn of the millennium, this particular part is timeless. I liked that.

Also, the movie Detention did something similar to mark the passage of the years as one character was stuck in detention, but I really liked how music was used here to introduce various high school cliques at the New Year’s Eve party, using bands like Souls of Mischief, Korn, Brian Setzer Orchestra, and Freaky Nasty, amongst others, to differentiate the jocks from the preppies, from the skater punks, from the stoners, on and on.

That was well done.

But all that aside, while Y2K is really nothing but warmed over, low-hanging-fruit, turn of the millennium nostalgia, that was made by people who are from that era, and isn’t really “inaccurate” in any specific ways… It just didn’t feel accurate at all. I get that it's an exaggerated horror/comedy, but it felt like it was based on a ”what the 90s were like” meme.

Plus, while it seems silly to critique a dumb teen comedy/gimmick “horror” film for being shallow, but… Y2K is neither a sharp parody, a funny comedy, or a scary, or all that gory, of a horror film. This is too bad, because I also feel like it could’ve been too, like it was almost there, but the film just didn’t have any teeth. Instead it’s nothing but lazy callbacks to pop culture quirks like AOL, Billy Banks, and Tamagotchis.

Speaking of lazy callbacks, Fred Durst is in this film. He’s basically to this movie what Neil Patrick Harris was to Harold & Kumar, but much like the music of Limp Bizkit is to music in general… he’s the much shittier version.

You really don’t need to bother watching this film.