I know it’s a cardinal sin for a critic to imagine What Could Have Been, but after watching Kyle Mooney’s Y2K, I couldn’t help but wonder what its high-concept logline might have looked like in the hands of someone like Joseph Kahn. It’s a fun one: pairing the “everything connected to the internet winds up turning on humanity” plot of Lord and Miller’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines with some old-fashioned late ‘90s aesthetics. Does it make any sense that an electric razor would come to life and slice up someone’s throat? Nah – this was, after all, the era before Wi-Fi became a gold standard, and you’ve got to imagine that the length of their ethernet cables would limit the ability of the impressively realized faux-Tetsuos (the iron men) made of Tamagotchis and weed-whackers to stalk their JNCO-sporting prey across the suburban Serengeti – but it would be devilishly fun in the right hands. However, Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter are less concerned with madcap entertainment than trying to create what it might look like if John Hughes and Steven Spielberg conceived a schmaltzy cross-breed of sentiment.
Some might be familiar with the adage, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Moody’s variation on that here is, “It’s easier to imagine everything going to techno-apocalyptic hell at midnight on January 1, 2000, than it is to imagine circumstances where a loser like Eli (Jaeden Martell) would ever wind up with a girl like Laura (Rachel Ziegler) without some sort of world-changing catastrophe.” Indeed, the entire disaster plot is primarily a venue to transform Eli from a fucking dork – the kind who prefers to stay at home and make custom action figures of the That ‘70s Show cast than to do anything “cool” with other high schoolers – to someone worthy of a popular (yet, of course, secretly and usefully nerdy) paramour. Eli’s been crushing on her hard for years, and when her shithead boyfriend breaks up with her, he sees an opportunity – a chance meeting with her before she and some bros rob a convenience store for some New Year’s libations lets him know her plans for the Eve. She’s going to a party hosted by jock-asshole Soccer Chris (The Kid Laroi), and everybody’s going to be there.
So, fueled with some liquid courage liberated from his parents’ locked liquor cabinet, Eli and his best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) make their way to Soccer Chris’s house a few hours before the ball drops. It goes poorly – Danny, a Kiwi fireball, somehow manages to impress the entire room with a goofy dance to “The Thong Song” and abandons his friend, Laura’s firmly in the sights of Soccer Chris, and, thanks to Danny’s loose lips, the entire school now knows that Eli knows what piss tastes like. He goes without a kiss when the clock strikes midnight, and everything seems safe – all that Y2K panic was for nothing, huh? – until the power goes out. It’s just a brief interruption, but enough to get everyone on edge. Then, someone dies, shot into the ceiling fan mid-coitus by an electric mattress. That’s when the machines make their presence known: all of those late ‘90s Gateways have sprouted some sort of digital hive mind and are using the non-sentient electronic material around them to create android forms to better kill or capture their former masters. Their ultimate plan is era-appropriate – all those PCs watched pirated copies of The Matrix alongside their owners – and they want to usher in the Singularity, albeit one with immaculate Windows screensaver vibes. So, Eli, Laura, Danny, and a few of their fellow outcasts must survive the night and maybe find a way to cancel the apocalypse.
Again, aside from the nerd wish fulfillment (and believe me, the narrative exacts a heavy price if you stand in the way of Eli’s quest to win Laura’s affection), this is a decent set-up for a disaster-slasher. It’s a solid step forward from the similarly-styled Brigsby Bear, moving the nostalgia aesthetic up a decade without sacrificing the cool, practically realized effects that made that notable, even if Mooney was only responsible for the story and a presence in front of the camera in that film. The robots are fantastically crafted – part of the fun is picking them apart and seeing what goofy shit from the era makes up their appendages – and the “digital world” the robot hivemind creates pays affectionate homage to the strangeness of the Lawnmower Man movies (which are just such bizarre artifacts from that era that only become more compelling when contrasted with our current digital sterility). Amid the non-stop onslaught of “Remember When…” humor, a few bits land, primarily thanks to Fred Durst, who shows up in a long-spoiled cameo that more or less has him join the ensemble for the third act. He still does a pretty fucking dope rendition of George Michael’s “Faith,” too, so it’s hard for me to talk too much shit about this movie.
Yet Y2K has a major problem: Mooney seems to have at least three different ideas about what this movie should be and no way to reconcile them. After a mad-cap first half hour, the second act is all painfully slow drama, in which our protagonists have a Breakfast Club-style “breakin’ of the stereotypes,” and each moment in which these characters, in this situation, in this world try to tug on our heartstrings is a hideous unforced error. It drags the movie to a halt and, even worse, robs us of the most compelling comic relief character, who isn’t appropriately substituted for until Durst shows up in that third act. Martell and Ziegler are a winning enough pair, but the film never lets their characters earn their romance – instead, it forces them to get together under narrative contrivance (Eli, you just haven’t earned it yet, baby). Mooney’s appearance as a stoner video store clerk and leader of a group of faux-Luddites in an abandoned factory only somewhat bridges this gap between the excitement of the first and third act, and it’s where I think a director like Kahn might have been able to sustain that narrative propulsion.
But really, a group singalong of “Tubthumping” is the general vibe for much Y2K, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing – it just fails such a fantastic premise. Still, I can’t help but imagine someone four hundred years from now discovering this in some digital archive and writing a scholarly volume on how this was the “secret history of the Millennium bug” or something, which is an oddly delightful thought.