'Y2K' is a Hilarious, Gory Romp on a Time Long Forgotten
As my fellow critic, Ian Simmons, says on his show Kicking the Seat, "There's no stalgia like nostalgia." Y2K is a blast from the past to just remind me how terribly old I am. It's similar to a growing trend of movies that take place in the eighties, nineties, or early 200s. In this case, it's at the turn of the millennium. Director Kyle Mooney takes a hot headline from 1999 and turns it into a what-if scenario. It also demonstrates how the media will hop on any headline that would send the public into a panic so that they could get ratings. Y2K looks back at a time of enormous anxiety to give it a laugh track. The film is a wonderful comedy and not a bad love story either.
Y2K hits us with the nostalgia right away. An AOL login screen appears in the frame. The user clicks on a video of President Bill Clinton addressing the Y2K issue. It has to buffer as the image appears pixelated. The instant messenger pops up where our user is talking to someone. I found this instance a bit off. At one point the user types in IMAO, deletes it, then types, LOL. I don't remember those terms being used at the time, but I could be mistaken. The movie reveals the user to be Eli (Jaeden Martell), a young teen.
The first act of the film plays like a straight, raunchy teen comedy. The second shifts gears into what really makes the film sell. What a good teen comedy does is establish its characters without everyone feeling like a typecast click or the same person. Those characters do exist in the film, but they're secondary characters to the movie's protagonists. Our main character is a shy kid who doesn't know how to communicate with the rest of the crowd. He's not exactly bullied, but he's also quiet around the other kids. His best friend, Danny (Julian Dennison), is a big fat New Zealander who has enormous confidence despite having only one real friend.
The movie's love interest, Laura (Rachel Ziegler), is the girl who fits in with the cool crowd but doesn't behave like a clicky primadonna. Laura treats everyone with respect and is even kind of a nerd herself, as she knows how to code. The second act of the film is where the real fun begins. Instead of getting a knockoff version of Superbad, we get something that has the thematic elements of The Terminator and End of Days mixed with the corny visual effects of The Lawnmower Man wrapped into a hilarious comedy. At one time, there was a widespread media sensation that when the clocks struck midnight, the computers would shut down all electricity because some of the programmers forgot to put in a piece of code that would adjust its timeframe when the year went from 1999-2000. In this film, not only do the lights shut off, but the computers start fighting back.
The concept of a comedy about computers turning against their users during Y2K is an idea I'm surprised nobody has thought of before. It's an easy one to come up with but hard to deliver on. Y2K not only delivers, it excels in comedy. The end of the world shouldn't be so darn funny, but it is. I guess you could quite literally call it a dark comedy since the power does shut down. What ends up hunting our heroes is a collection of self-built robots with some really impressive animatronics. The only time CGI is used is for a scene is when two airplanes collide with each other and when we see a human representation of the evil A.I. on a computer screen. That's when it looks like The Lawnmower Man.
Y2k is a comedy slasher. If you go into the film blind, you'll have a blast when the blood starts spraying. If you're reading this review before seeing it, you've already ruined the surprise for yourself. I understand. You want to know if it's worth your time, right? It absolutely is. But not if you're seeing it alone. That is unless you have more confidence than me and aren't self-conscious about laughing by yourself in a movie theater.
The gags are great. There's one gnarly kill involving CDs and another with a chainsaw. The film creates a glaring plothole when Eli takes out one of the computers with some water. If that's a solution, have the fire department start spraying. Yet I think that's also the joke. The director knows that the audience is smart enough to think that solution up, so the movie mocks it. As odd as it sounds, Y2K is a feel-good film about the end of the world released during times that feel like everything is coming to an end for humanity. Especially with A.I. on the rise. So why not laugh about it while we're still briefly around?
