Y2K (2024)

Y2K-(2024)
Y2K (2024)

The audience may soon be treated to a new sub-genre of films that could be termed as youth nostalgia genre and it has increasingly been growing in popularity as the years pass by. The strange but appealing aspect of such films is the recurrent obsession that takes hold of various audiences of intergalactic Star Wars akin to the Star Wars franchises Lucas. And every decade or so there is another one released or even revived such as “American Graffiti” or “Dazed and Confused.” But the strange part comes when there is a noticeable gap of time between the filming of the movie and its release. When “American Graffiti” was delivered to theaters, however, it was set eleven years in the past, yet it came out in 1973. Distinctive storylines forge through as time progresses. It’s almost like a necessary requirement for the production companies and writers. The era has to stand out from the current times, therefore, an 11-year gap serves that purpose quite well indeed. One can argue that any period would seem too strange to find production companies huddled attempting to bring together the efforts and finances necessary for the work involved in filming a movie set nowadays. With American Graffiti due for a new adaptation, or rerun if you will, who would want to make a youth-based film depicting street racing culture and beach cruising in the future world of 2050? It sounds cringe, uncomfortable, and simply unrealistic as films based in such an era look more appealing and just credible due to factual representation and setting. Therefore the term Y2K can be pegged amongst the most ludicrous and shameless accusations in the movie industry. Imagine owning a bank in that era with the highest level of security possible only for random teenagers to burst in and ruin everything.

I believe the reason the gap between the time the movies about youth experiences are made, and the time the experiences happened keeps widening is due to the growth and proliferation of media. After all, we proportionally have more and more as every decade passes – more screens, more pictures, more technology that makes everyday life look like an alternate version of itself. (In a strange sense, “Dazed and Confused,” remade three decades later, has become a movie about the lack of technology in the ’70s) Nowadays we are living at an era – so imbibed in the present that the past takes longer and longer for it to be felt as the past, relative to the time! “Y2K” however just as its title suggests is based in an age where there was a growing fear of technology.

But it is also very much a Y2K nostalgia movie, allowing the director, former SNL cast member Kyle Mooney, along with his screenwriter Evan Winter, to delve into the intoxication of that decade for quite some time. The film starts with an AOL screen followed by the dial-up tone and literally before the movie begins, ordering a video of Bill Clinton, which is of course blurry.

“Y2K” is drowning in delicious contextual details and elements. Grimey neighborhood DVD shop. CD mixtape. Pam and Tommy’s sex tape. Abercrombie. White kids doing their crazy white freestyle shawty. “Praise You”, “Tubthumping”. And let’s not forget the last dull incarnation of an old-school icon, the video-rental store employee – in this case, a center of coolness and drug addiction with hippy hair locks Garrett, performed by Mooney whose cracked acting embedded with “Yo!” or “what?” and doped up grin is also among the best bits of the film.

For a time in the Y2K era, Y2K had a sort of charm that makes you want to consider the film a “Dazed in Adventureland Graffiti” vibe for the last age of this year. The movie begins on New Year’s Eve and there is a plot about an all-nighter party involving two nerds in what appears to be a self-referential approach to movies such as Super Bad through Booksmart. Eli, the protagonist, is the most good-looking, articulate, and rather hot one out there – almost like a comedic time capsule, the protagonist, Jaeden Martell, looks like a long-lost member of the Culkin family. Danny, Eli’s friend since he was in seventh grade, has the ever-complaining and well-fed figure while Julian Dennison plays him and presents a more hyper and active version of Jonah Hills Seth from Superbad (One of the producers for this show is even Hill). These two wait in line for nakedness and then they wait and prepare themselves for a New Year\’s Eve bash at a suburban place in the house of a jerk called Soccer Chris (who plays Chris, an Australian rapper, The Kid Laroi).

There’s a side plot involved within the party because Eli now likes Laura (Rachel Zegler), who appears to have been blessed with beauty and charm undeniable over all periods she’s the popular girl. Definitely not the catch a guy like Eli is supposed to be able to bag. But civilizations change. Laura is not now a possible prom queen, mean girl — such a type is already outdated. She follows trends now similar to Eli, who is passionate about the new computer culture that is appropriating the term ‘cool’. And they’ve become flirty friends. We can assume that the New Year’s Eve party is special because it’s the only occasion when things may happen at midnight. Danny is concerned whether Eli and Laura will have this chance.

Fair enough and in some sense, unremarkable. In his first feature about which he took all the reins after co-creating and acting in the 2017 film “Brigsby Bear,” Mooney is good at showing the party the messy hip-hop atmosphere, the competitive subgroups, the recklessness surrounding hooking up and finding out. Been to one and the same as the 1999 movie, but are content to take that trip again.

But then the ride stops. Midnight comes. The apocalyptic Y2K clock strikes. The darkness comes first and brightens up again. But something has happened.

Y2K, as they call it, is not a date for a wild 90s-themed party. It is actually a Sci-fi mockumentary wherein all the Y2K-related fears have turned into realities. When the clock ticks, the technology does truly fail only to fail again and rise up again. Y2k comes out to be a Terminator-themed movie. However, it remains a teen coming-of-age school comedy. So how well do the two go together?

Not warmly. To be fair, let me clarify that. It’s not that the two parts of the movie do not match each other. It is that the last hour of it, the irreverent post-apocalypse horror with alien technologies, simply isn’t very good.

At the beginning of ‘Y2K’, the Y2K apocalypse begins at a slasher level. At one of the parties, the machines that had just gone to a stand-still for a few seconds, spring back to life as fiendish instruments of violence. Children get impaled and slain by a million-watt microwave and a vicious blender. For a moment, I thought this is like a scene from “Shaun of the Dead” – after which, blood-spattering calms down pretty quickly, ‘Y2K’ actually does turn into a zombie-kind of the picture. At the Bahay, digitally-challenged machine parts and wires meld into a bulky Neanderthal g cube with a flickering screen in place of the head, this uneasily walking T-800 is both a killer and an embodiment of the dawn of a new era. They are coming to power! And they want to obliterate us all.

However, once Eli, Laura, and two of the other kids break free, they make their way through the woods and the deserted roads where they witness a burning skyline from the top of a hill. The film, after this point, goes very slow and gets into that dull storytelling kind of approach that so many zombie films get into, which is where the only living things are the zombies ‘set pieces.’ For the rest of the movie, the characters become rather boring. The film drags. Nevertheless, the stoner Garrett shows up. Also, the one and only Fred Durst stepped into the frame. The ex-Limp Bizkit member is now a bit older but still wore his trademark hat, messing up people’s expectations and getting the SXSW audience hyped up.

The idea of “Y2K” may seem very 1999 to this generation. The film emphasizes on the fact that it was during this period that we colonized cyberspace and the computers operating it turned us into cybernetic entities of some sort. Hence, the monster machines of the film are us, or something like us. Or not. But now let’s proceed with ‘Y2K’ in this regard. Perhaps the most important filming occurrence in 1999 was that it was the period when the second transformation began, the one that started an era in which there was never a superfluous concept that could not be exploited, and proprietary ideas were monopolized.

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