By the time our AOL 5.0 calendars or Palm Pilot devices reached the date of Dec. 31, 1999, most of our fears about a worldwide Y2K meltdown had been alleviated, in large part because technology companies and the government had taken preemptive measures.
Still, we weren’t certain until we were certain. It was all hands on deck in most newsrooms; in my capacity as a news columnist for the Sun-Times, I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 bouncing around the city, spending time with families, churchgoers, revelers and police, just in case chaos erupted. I later wrote, “New Years Eve 1999 was destined to be a night of colorful merriment, marred by only the occasional glitch,” and “In the real-life movie of Y2K … we survived the big doomsday scenario with our computerized society intact.”
Now comes the movie-movie of Y2K.
Some 25 years (!) later, “SNL” alum Kyle Mooney directs, co-writes and plays a supporting role in the disaster comedy “Y2K,” which re-imagines a world in which the Year 2000 problem not only became a reality but threatened to end humanity. It’s a clever premise — basically, Skynet invades a “Booksmart” storyline — and for a while, the affectionate satire and the steady stream of pop-culture references and the grisly shocks carry the day.
Unfortunately, “Y2K” fizzles out somewhere around the halfway point, in part because the characters aren’t fleshed out much beyond familiar tropes, and the screenplay seems not quite finished. It’s as if the filmmakers ran out of fresh ideas at some point but just plowed ahead anyway.
Popping with the images and sounds of pixilated videos, dial-up modem ringtones, “The Macarena” and “Tubthumping,” camcorders and mix tapes, “Y2K” instantly establishes the time period as the story kicks off on New Year’s Eve 1999, with a cast of talented young actors doing fine work playing familiar types.
Jaeden Martell is the sweet and shy Eli and Julian Dennison is Eli’s best buddy Danny, with a sly sense of humor and no shortage of self-confidence. Rachel Zegler, who continues to demonstrate movie-star talent and presence, is Laura, who is gorgeous and popular and a secret computer nerd, and of course Eli is in love with Laura and of course Eli can barely muster the courage to say two words to her. Add some bullies and a dumb jock and a few other tropes and let’s get this party, i.e., a house party in the suburbs, started.
At the stroke of midnight, it appears as if technology has indeed crashed — but then the machines come to “life” and start slicing and dicing up the humans, in gruesomely comedic fashion.
The crude and ridiculous killing devices are initially amusing, though the joke wears thin as “Y2K” segues into a “Cabin in the Woods”-type horror film. Fred Durst has an extended, one-joke cameo as Fred Durst, which might have seemed original if we hadn’t already seen Bill Murray as himself in “Zombieland,” and Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, et al., playing themselves in “This Is the End.” In another bit of miscalculation, arguably the most likable and interesting character in the film is dispatched far too early. Like a slow-loading image on a home computer in the late 1990s, “Y2K” seems kinda cool, but the payoff isn’t worth the wait.