The late ‘90s were a baffling time in history — but our shared fascination with the era is as much about what didn’t happen as what actually did. Most over the age of 35 have been haunted by the idea of the “Millennium Bug,” a conspiracy that essentially heralded apocalypse via computer glitch. It was an object of rapt obsession, and our first true brush with modern doomsday prepping — even though it turned out to be all for naught in the end. But there are those who still wonder what our world might have looked like had the Millennium Bug actually come online.
In the 25 years since a few hundred programmers averted the apocalypse, the Y2K problem has faded into legend… at least for those of us who weren’t around to witness the hysteria it inspired. But with nostalgia for the early 2000s rearing its head in a major way, elder millennials are keen to revisit their youth — the good, the bad, and the hypothetical. Enter, Y2K, a kitschy “what if” about the armageddon we managed to avoid in 1999, wrapped in the veneer of a raunchy teen comedy.
Directed by Kyle Mooney, distributed by A24, and starring some of the brightest young stars of their generation, Y2K has the makings of the next great coming-of-age story. It’s also, at many turns, a horror, as Mooney — who co-wrote Y2K alongside Evan Winters — doesn’t shy away from the creative murders one would expect from a doomsday. The finished product is Red Dawn meets Superbad, at least in its raucous first act. But as a punchy sci-fi slasher gives way to a surprisingly earnest nostalgia dive, Mooney’s initial pitch gets lost in a torrent of stale tropes.
It’s not easy to watch something start out as a biting, self-aware satire, only to turn into the very cliche it set out to parody. It’s not that the world needs another snarky meditation on dystopia — and to Mooney’s credit, Y2K wants to be the kind of apocalypse movie that shows us light at the end of the tunnel, even with a pernicious virus hijacking every piece of tech it can find to enslave humanity. That the fate of the world rests in the hands of a few plucky, awkward teens — primarily the soft-spoken Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his bombastic best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) — is what makes it so charming at the outset. Y2K is at its best when focused on this odd couple pairing: winks and nods to America Online, That ‘70s Show, and even Tae Bo feel like a natural part of their world, and their buoyant rapport keeps everything running smoothly.
Somehow, though, all that momentum grinds to a halt with the manifestation of the Millennium Bug. Y2K peaks early, at a New Year’s Eve party that turns into a bloodbath. Once the clock strikes 12, it doesn’t take long for a SkyNet-inspired virus to take hold — and soon, anything that runs on electricity can be used as a device to murder. Some of the film’s most creative choices live in this one sequence, as amalgamated robots (designed practically by Wēta Workshop) mow down any inebriated teen that crosses their path. But once Eli, Danny, and a handful of classmates — Eli’s crush Laura (Rachel Zegler), Limp Bizkit diehard Ash (Lachlan Watson), and the navel-gazey poet CJ (Daniel Zolghadri) — escape the house of horrors to fend for themselves in the wild, Y2K seems to lose most of its magic.
Mooney and Winter make a clever choice in rallying disparate high school cliques to one cause. With the world as they know it gone and most members of their nondescript Northeastern town either dead or captured, our unlikely heroes must work together to save the day. Along the way, they encounter a few scene-stealing allies: Mooney pulls double duty as a burnout mentor figure to Danny and Eli, while Scream’s Mason Gooding appears for a brief, amusing cameo as Laura’s beatnik ex-boyfriend. Another, very ‘90s cameo seems to start as a gag, but later informs an unbearably earnest emotional climax. The latter is just one of a few baffling choices made in Y2K: The film doesn’t really know where to go after the phenomenon actually happens, but in cycling through one cliche after the next, it abandons the sense of style and purpose that made its opening moments so enticing.
Y2K suffers from an aimless plot and an overreliance on nostalgia, but its greatest mistake may be in neglecting the strongest members of its cast. Zegler and Martell are two walking charm factories, and watching their characters finally make good on their respective, unspoken crushes is a true high point of the film. But Dennison is woefully underused, as are comedians like Eduardo Franco (Stranger Things) and even, honestly, Mooney himself. As our story leans more into sci-fi and horror, it forgets that it’s also a comedy. There’s still plenty to like in this alternate history, but there’s also a sense that it could have done more with a story decades in the making.
