“Y2K” (2024) Review

It’s a strange sensation to now be at an age where recollections of AOL, CD burning, video stores, and VCRs are now ingredients of a period piece. Within minutes of Y2K starting, there’s an onslaught of that nostalgia, watching a teenager’s browser dart between buffering Realplayer for news and loading up a Flash game. Peppered with a soundtrack of the era, a film like this should send me straight back to when I was 14. But I’ve grown up since then, and while retro commercials and vaporware smearings across YouTube might satisfy this old soul for a few minutes, a film as aimless as this merely reveals the mold that accumulated in this old box of millennial crap.

As the title implies, it’s the final day of 1999, and everybody in suburbia is celebrating the end of the millennium. Teenager Eli (Jaeden Martell) is trying to find a way to be cool and maybe hit things off with his crush, Laura (Rachel Zegler). With his spirited best friend Danny (Julian Dennison), Eli can attend the big party with friends in the neighborhood. Despite big hopes for the future, the New Year arrives with the Y2K bug taking effect and the machines rebelling against humanity. It’s up to Eli and the few surviving teenagers to fight back against the machines and live to see the new year. Much like the nostalgic dump of era-appropriate elements, the mere sight of attacking machines becomes more of a joke than any cleverness that could be evoked from this situation. There are scenes where the teenagers have their hands eaten by garbage disposals and their dicks chopped up by blenders. An observant viewer would probably question how a tall blender somehow managed to get lodged on a teen’s dick, but we never see that line of thought, arriving at the punchline before the setup. It feels like there’s a decent joke in there about teens fucking appliances akin to American Pie.

Despite director Kyle Mooney having lived through that period, Y2K is approached more like a Gen-Z filmmaker’s B-movie interpretation of the late 90s teen scene. Although exaggeration is welcome for a film aiming to be more of a horror-comedy, all the absurdity is approached with half-thought ideas on how a Y2K bug could be a ridiculous apocalyptic event. But much like Mooney’s stoner video clerk character in this film, all the film can muster is some old junk stumbling around in search of a joke. Watching a laptop computer become hostile using a power-wheels car and K’Nex is an amusing sight for a few seconds, but the wait required for the machine to wield a flamethrower at an unsuspecting teen reveals how rickety the premise can be. The smaller staging of the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment on Y2K was more fitting for humor and horror, considering I didn’t have to spend much time thinking about how electric razors could rebel.

A smattering of old tech and 90s references is not enough to hold an entire film, leading to the film becoming lost amid lukewarm teen drama and grimy B-movie tropes (albeit with some admirable practical effects). This is a film so desperate to find humor that it resorts to having the heroes being locked in a tumbling porta-potty as shit smears them with juxtaposed romantic music. This is a real shame because Mooney’s previous TV project, Saturday Morning All Star Hits, did an excellent job wielding ’90s nostalgia for something more than references. Perhaps it was because that show had the benefit of trying to craft original cartoons with familiar hallmarks, rather than just outright point and gawk at the likes of Bobby’s World and Denver The Last Dinosaur. But in a film where real references can be afforded, the creativity dwindles so low that a cameo by Fred Durst not only has the music icon playing himself, but the characters have to introduce him by name. Compare this with how cleverly Durst occupied the 90s territory of I Saw The TV Glow, where there was something more to his presence than merely spouting such lame lines as “Y’all got me talking like Tipper Gore.”

Y2K coasts on its retro appeal so hard that even nostalgic millennials will spit out this curdled milk of meandering absurdity. Perhaps the following generation might find the retro-chic vibe appealing for that lingering feeling of being born in the wrong decade. But as someone who grew up with the traditions of video stores and instant-messenger noises, it takes more than a chunky “You’ve Got Mail” WAV file and Lawnmower-Man-esque computer viruses to tease that warm spot of old comfort in the mind. If I wanted all those old feelings, I could find the wealth of archived commercials and software online to appease that nostalgic lust. Films like Y2K make a strong case for how those elements should stay relegated to archives if nothing can be done with them in cinema besides reminding you that AOL and Fred Durst existed when I was younger. This is the type of movie where you aggrivatingly want to speak back to it with, “Yes, I know, I was there! I remember Devil Sticks, too!”