Welcome to the End of the World
The feature directing career of SNL alum Kyle Mooney gets off to a rather inauspicious start with Y2K, a sci-fi horror comedy that steals virtually all of its ideas from previous, better movies, several of which starred its own co-producer, Jonah Hill.
The film’s reasonably funny for a 10-minute stretch, but that can’t save it from a comedy style that’s nearly entirely dependent on a style of humor that’s “Hey, remember this product/catchphrase/pop culture fad from 25 years ago?” There’s a lot of AOL Instant Messenger, Discmen on car dashboards, the Dancing Baby from Ally McBeal, porn that downloads very slowly, and other things meant to make audience members point at the screen and say, “Hey, I remember that!” as opposed to laughing. The vintage soundtrack, however, hits much better.
The almost entirely laugh-free first half hour is a straight lift from Hill’s great comedy Superbad, as a pair of high school nerds named Eli and Danny (Jaeden Martell and Julian Dennison), one skinny and the other stocky, go to a party and hope to score with girls. But first, the film makes time for an awful getting-stoned scene, starring the director himself in a particularly tiresome turn. Although, unlike Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, at least it doesn’t stretch out the drug sequence over the entire last hour of the movie.
Eli’s object of affection is played by future Snow White Rachel Zegler, introduced as a gorgeous genius computer hacker, which is apropos since, in real life, Zegler has the power to make people’s heads explode on the Internet. Things continue that way until supernatural elements lead to chaos, as they did in another Hill movie, This is the End. There’s also a flying porta-potty scene, which could be a lift from either Police Academy or Jackass.
The film’s set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, and the high concept entails the worst case of the Y2K Problem coming true and machines attacking humanity. The moment this happens is the film’s one true stretch of creative inspiration, as the kills are some of the most creative of the year. Unfortunately, the film can’t keep up the momentum, with the third act especially lackluster.
The robotic villains are essentially the Borg from Star Trek, except they don’t look as cool, and don’t have a compelling backstory or a motivation that makes any sense. The plot resolves itself with something that an entire Star Trek episode treated as an existential moral dilemma.
There’s too much nostalgia and not enough comedy. That Eli’s mom is played by 1990s It Girl Alicia Silverstone is worth a chuckle or two, but the film also casts Tim Heidecker as his dad, and doesn’t give him a single funny thing to do. I’m not sure what the point was of pulling out Fred Durst to play a heroic version of himself when Durst hasn’t gone away; he played a dad character in another (much better) nostalgic A24 movie, I Saw the TV Glow, just a few months ago.
This theme was done with Y2K: The Movie, a TV disaster film that aired in November of 1999, weeks before the turn of the Millennium, and imagined blackouts and nuclear meltdowns instead of robot takeovers. Much better was 2023’s archival documentary Time Bomb Y2K, which used a wide breadth of footage to show what the hysteria of that moment was all about. Ignore the new Y2K and seek that instead.