We were looking for a movie to see because it was Tuesday, when tickets at Alamo Drafthouse are close to half-price. The problem was that little looked particularly worthwhile. I have absolutely no interest in ever seeing Wicked, Nightbitch looks like something I might eventually watch if it turns up on streaming and, IDK if I was really in the mood to be terrified by Hugh Grant in Heretic. 

But, this Y2K, the new movie directed by Kyle Mooney, sounds pretty funny, especially since we’re old enough to remember the build-up to that New Year’s Eve. In real life, people spent a full year playing “1999” ad nauseam and hawking survival kits, but, then nothing happened. The sky was not all purple. People weren’t running everywhere. We didn’t even get a computer crash. The world remained somewhat normal, or so we thought. And another two decades would pass before I could listen to “1999” again. 

Anyhow, Y2K, a comedy-horror flick where a computer glitch does cause tech to run amok in the wee hours of 2000, had promise. The only thing was that the reviews were mid, but, then again, we’re adults who are capable of making up our own minds. We’re also adults whose recent viewing history includes the oeuvre of Frank Henenlotter, so, yeah, let’s go see Y2K. 

We ended up at an early evening screening, sitting in the back row of a small, sparsely populated theater, loaded with sodas and a large bowl of buttered popcorn. A retro how-to-use-the-internet video played, followed by some Y2K-related news clips and a survival kit commercial. 

The premise of Y2K is that the computer apocalypse hits just after a midnight on January 1, 2000, turning every piece of tech into a killing machine. At a rager in an unnamed town that’s probably in California, a group of high school kids escape what has become a house party massacre. Their goal now is to survive the night and maybe save the world while they’re at it. The vibe is not all that different from cult classics like Chopping Mall and Night of the Comet. If you love those movies, then you’ll probably dig Y2K as well. 

What makes Y2K stand out is that it’s rooted in a very specific period of time, but is more about today than it is about the past. The details are spot-on 1999. Did anyone else notice the Discman on the car dashboard? I had that in ’99! The adapter was actually a cassette that goes into the tape deck so you could play CDs through your car stereo. And the mom-and-pop video store with the porn section was a much better choice for this movie than the corporate behemoth that was putting the little guys out of business at the time. The poster for Half Baked hanging in the video store was a nice touch, btw. 

The cliques at the party are legit too. It absolutely makes sense in 1999 that the jock asshole is an extremely blonde soccer player and that the girls basketball team is a big deal. The party is filled with candy ravers and swing kids. There’s an underground hip-hop head who wears a floppy hat and name drops Freestyle Fellowship. I knew That Dude, several, actually. We all did. The misfits are “rap-rockers,” which actually is how people referred to the nu-metal crowd back then, and the ringleader is a bully wearing a Tool t-shirt. Super accurate. That the one girl in this crowd is treated like shit is really a reference to Woodstock ’99 and the bro-hard attitude in the rock world at the time.

That’s part of the reason why I say the movie isn’t nostalgic. Nostalgia would be remembering the ‘90s as the era of “girl power,” which isn’t wasn’t. It’s cherry-picking pieces of the past to create a false-memory of how much better things were in a time that no one remembers accurately. By 1999, we were already hooked on tech and we did communicate in pop culture references that more-or-less siloed us into different timelines. None of that is new. Like, I did not know anyone who took the Y2K threat seriously, but, I guess somewhere, there were people who did. 

People often lament that there’s no “monoculture” today, but, I’m not sure that ever existed in the first place. If it did, that was definitely gone by the end of the 20th century. At that point, you had a small handful of songs, like “Tubthumping,” that everyone knew and a handful of television series, like That ‘70s Show, that most had at least seen while flipping through channels. 

So, when tech literally tries to overpower humanity in Y2K, it’s an apt metaphor for what actually did happen in the 21st century, with computers gaining power as people continued to feed more information into the machines. There’s a lot of smart commentary in here, but it’s also a fun movie with a great cast. 

Back in ’99, a movie like this would have also been panned by critics. Then it would go on to become a cable staple and, in two decades time, it would be bonafide cult classic. Today, Y2K will probably become a TUBI hit that’s embraced by today’s toddlers when they’re retro-obsessed college kids streaming movies instead of writing term papers. My point being: Things don’t really change, even if our devices do.

Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs.

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