Director – Kyle Mooney, Screenplay – Kyle Mooney & Evan Winter, Producers – Matt Dines, Alison Goodwin, Jonah Hill, Christopher Storer, Cooper Wehde & Evan Winter, Photography – Bill Pope, Music – Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans, Visual Effects – Clean Plate FX, Crafty Apes VFX (Supervisor – Mitch Gates), Ingenuity Studios & Maere Studios (Supervisors – Nicholas Ashe Bateman & Federico La Tona), Special Effects Supervisor – Johann Kunz, Specialty Props – Weta Workshop Limited, Production Design – Jason Singleton. Production Company – Strong Baby Productions/American Light & Fixture Productions.
Cast
Jaeden Martell (Eli), Rachel Zegler (Laura), Julian Dennison (Danny Bannon), Lachlan Watson (Ash), Daniel Zohlghadri (CJ), Fred Durst (Himself), Kyle Mooney (Garrett), Eduardo Franco (Farkas), The Kid Laroi (Soccer Chris), Alicia Silverstone (Robin), Tim Heidecker (Howard)
Plot
It is the last day of the 20th Century before the clocks turn over from 1999 to 2000. Everywhere there are fears of computers being affected by the Y2K Bug. Eli has a crush on Rachel, a homecoming queen who is also a hacker. When he learns that Rachel has broken up with her boyfriend and is attending a party that night, Eli and his best friend Danny decide to crash the party. Things go miserably as Danny has to deal with the bullying Soccer Chris who has designs on Rachel. As the clocks turn over to midnight, they are attacked by all the electronics in the house suddenly turned murderous. Realising that the Y2K Bug has gone ahead and created an artificial intelligence that is determined to crush humanity, Eli and the others try to flee to safety.
Y2K was a directing/writing debut for Kyle Mooney who had previously worked in comedy and wrote the screenplay for Brigsby Bear (2017). Mooney is also present on screen in the film and plays a really annoying character of a stoner videostore clerk. The film was given a release by A24, the independent US distributor that specialises in off-the-beaten-track material with releases that include Moonlight (2016), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), The Whale (2022), Civil War (2024) and Heretic (2024), among others.
I remember when the Y2K Problem was massive. It was in the news everywhere as The Millennium approached. People had realised that the way computers registered the date would mean that they would reset when they switched over 31/12/99 from to 01/01/00. There was enormous fear of worldwide chaos occurring and systems shutting down. Various patches to fix this were offered – I was asked to go around and update computers in the place I was working at the time. The year 2000 then rolled around and the expected social chaos turned out to be a big nothing. Not to say there weren’t some problems – some credit card systems, several nuclear reactors and a Turkish oil pipeline shut down – but most people were left unaffected. The Y2K Bug had been the subject of one previous film, the tv movie Y2K (1999) while does appear as happening in the subsequent Relaxer (2018).
The film opens with a near-perfect evocation of life circa 1999-2000 – of Jaeden Martell using AOL and the familiar skree-ding-ding sound of a dial-up connection, of videos of Bill Clinton as President (all in poorly pixellated rendering), Windows 95, chats programs like ICQ, porn photos taking two minutes to fully download, and throwaway scenes with Jaeden’s parents amazed that they can get the internet over their new cellphones and comments about Enron in the headlines.
(l to r) Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler and Julian Dennison face the machines gone amok as the Y2K Bug hits
Y2K starts out as a smart and amusing Coming of Age story. Julian Dennison from The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2006) has an incredibly live wire presence – the film is co-produced by Jonah Hill and this is exactly the sort of role Hill would have played a few years ago. Dennison is almost a Mercutio character who is so dynamic that he outshines the leads, hence ends up being abruptly removed from the action about two-thirds of the way through. Not that Jaeden Martell doesn’t hold his own – he embodies youthful innocence on the cusp of adulthood and the perfect boy becoming man that this sort of story is founded in to a point of perfection.
Without warning around the 27-minute point, Y2K flips over into a Machines Amok film. There is a very entertaining sequence where an assortment of appliances around the house start killing people via a deadly radio-controlled car wielding an aerosol can and cigarette lighter combination, ejected videotapes, blenders to the crotch, and The Kid Laroi being tripped over by a dishwasher door so that he impales his head in the microwave, which switches on and cooks him. I was very much getting a Maximum Overdrive (1986) vibe about this point.
Thereafter, we get a standard war with the machines plot. The effects work gone into creating the ramshackle machines is very clever. The story plays out in a series of familiar arcs, which Kyle Mooney and the cast play out with a good deal of engagement and humour. And okay I did kind of have some credibility issues with Rachel Ziegler’s character who manages to be both a homecoming queen and one of the popular girls at the same time as a super-nerd hacker – it feels a little too much like somebody’s idea of the ultimate dream girl. The film also probably didn’t need Fred Durst, the lead singer of Limp Bizkit, playing himself – Durst looks gloopy and kind of lost amid the younger cast.
