The trailer for the new film Y2K gives viewers a pretty good idea of the structure of the film it’s promoting: what begins as a high school comedy abruptly shifts gears into horror — a mash-up of American Pie and Maximum Overdrive, maybe. When I went to the Alamo Drafthouse on Tuesday to watch it, I thought about another point of comparison during much of the film: Attack the Block, another movie that effectively blends comedy, horror, and science fiction. But it wasn’t until Y2K’s climax that I realized that the best point of comparison wasn’t any of these films. Instead, it was Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
Don’t worry; I’m going to expand on that in a moment. For now, though, here’s a quick rundown of the film’s plot and premise: it’s December 31, 1999 and high school juniors Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison) are at a loss as to how to ring in the New Year, except perhaps by watching Junior. Eli harbors a serious crush on their classmate Laura (Rachel Zegler), who’s both wildly popular and deft enough with coding that she’s built their high school’s website.
[spoilers for Y2K follow]
A chance run-in at a local convenience store leads to Eli, Danny, and Laura all being at the same party when the clocks strike midnight. At that point, the Y2K bug turns out to be something much nastier than anyone expected: it’s a virus that spreads through virtually any electronic device, one that gives them a penchant for combining into larger configurations and the desire to kill the humans around them, often in the most violent manner possible. Co-writer/director Kyle Mooney takes the horror part of the equation seriously, and throws in no small amount of gore to boot.
At multiple points in the film, Laura is seen hacking various computers, and it’s safe to say that Y2K’s version of hacking bears very little resemblance to the real thing. At first, this distracted me to no end; in the wake of, say, Mr. Robot, I’d thought filmmakers might opt for a more realistic take on depictions of infiltrating computer systems. Laura’s work felt a lot more like the wildly inaccurate hacking scenes featured in films like 1994’s Disclosure.
That was about when it kicked in: the inaccuracy was the point. It’s probably best not to think of Y2K as a 2024 film set in an alternate history where the Y2K bug was real. Instead, think of it as a mid-90s film about what might happen in Y2K that happens to have been released in 2024 — with all of the tropes and cliches that that implies.
So of course Laura is the greatest hacker for miles, able to figure out what the evil robots’ entire plan is within roughly five minutes of hacking into one of their systems. Of course the film doesn’t spend too much time explaining precisely how devices assimilate other devices. Did you think too closely about how Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith could upload a virus on an alien spacecraft on Independence Day? It’s worth noting here that the characters even point out at one point that their plan is, essentially, the same way humanity defeats alien invaders in that movie.
The Independence Day homage is far from the only hat-tip to 1990s science fiction films, though. Another subplot evokes part of the setting of The Matrix. Laura’s hacking scenes could have been taken from any number of 1990s techno-thrillers. Even the special effects tend towards the practical as opposed to the computer-animated; one scene in which a sinister composite robot adds parts to itself looks to have been created using stop-motion animation. Things get even more obscure in places; I’d put money on the jaggedly-animated personification of the robotic intelligence that verbally jousts with our heroes at the film’s climax being an homage to the demonic CGI version of Jeff Fahey that menaces Pierce Brosnan in The Lawnmower Man.
That’s where I come back around to Austin Powers. While it can be seen as a James Bond parody, there’s a lot more going on there — in his review of the film, Roger Ebert pointed out that Powers contains homages to plenty of other 1960s spy movies, including some that writer and star Mike Myers cited as inspirations for it. It’s a film — and, more broadly, a series — that both riffs on an entire genre and period of filmmaking and plays out according to the logic of the films that reside in its creative DNA. But it also has the feeling — for the most part, anyway — of a late-60s spy movie parody that happens to have been frozen for decades along with its title character.
Y2K’s attempt to both comment on an era and play like an example of media from that same era has precedent in Kyle Mooney’s work; his last major project was the Netflix series Saturday Morning All Star Hits!, designed as a series of television shows — mostly cartoons — that aired in the 1980s and 1990s. There’s more going on there than a collection of parodies, though, even if one of the segments seems designed to ask the question, “What if the Care Bears were also a metaphor for cocaine?” There’s a constant push and pull between ironic distance and haunting sincerity across the series — something fans of Mooney’s work on Saturday Night Live, including 2020’s Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles, will also recognize.
Mooney’s projects have a recognizable ethos, but I also recognize that his sense of humor isn’t to everyone’s liking. Reviews of Y2K have been mixed to date, but Nathan Rabin’s glowing review is what ultimately got me to the theater. (Rabin has also written enthusiastically about SMASH!.) And I’m ultimately glad that I did: the central performances are solid, the robot designs are nicely creepy, and it’s left me with a renewed appreciation for Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.” While not everything about Y2K clicked for me, looking at it through this lens made me appreciate it much more. After all, it’s one thing to make a horror-comedy set in Y2K; it’s another thing indeed to make a horror-comedy that looks like it’s an artifact from Y2K.
Image: A24
Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and sign up for our mailing list.