Here’s what I understood about the Y2K threat: Early coders got bored typing out dates, so they simplified the process, often shortening the year to two digits. Yes, that meant any machine keeping a date would assume year (19)99 is followed by year (00)00. In the 1970s and 1980s, this didn’t matter. 2000 was a long way off. And who cares if your wristwatch thought it was the year 2000, the year 1900, or 500 BC anyway? Some coding was intended, however, for time triggers. For instance, if you wanted your business to be closed on Christmas Day, but didn’t want to have to do anything about it, you’d set automatic locks to go into effect for that date. *poof* Problem solved.
OK, so what happens if there is a time trigger for something truly dangerous, like detonating a nuclear bomb? And when reading a date of 2000, the bomb actually read “1900” and set itself because of a severe programming flaw. No, bombs shouldn’t work like that. But this wasn’t the only possibility; what if automatic interest accrual went negative because the bank coding assumed it went back in time, triggering an immediate Wall Street panic? That could happen, right? Right?
Well, that’s what we were worried about. That somehow coding years as two-digit instead of four-digit would cause bombs to explode and markets to fall simultaneously the very second we hit the year 2000.
Was any of the threat real? It is easy to say, “no” as it didn’t happen. I prefer to believe nobody was stupid enough to put a nuclear bomb on an automatic timer or tie financial fortunes exclusively to lazy programming, BUT that could just be naivete on my part. It could be there were real threats and this is one of the few times humanity adjusted to control innovation rather than letting innovation adjust control. Seems unlikely, given what humanity is, but who is to say, really?
And this is where (writer, director, co-star) Kyle Mooney comes in with a silly and bad comic horror film assuming the threat of Y2K was an AI takeover, which it definitely was not. Does it matter that Kyle Mooney got this detail wrong? Probably not. The entire film is tongue-in-cheek silly; it’s like saying Airplane! got airport protocol wrong.
Our heroes are two high school zeroes, Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison). Their current goal in life is renting the film where Arnold Schwarzenegger gets pregnant. It is at this point where the film immediately loses me – am I supposed to find this moment funny or sad. Because it is both without being strongly either. Eli is in love with Laura (Rachel Zegler), a girl so far out of his league she may as well be playing a different sport.
But, for whatever reason (nothing in the screenplay suggests why), she kind of likes him. Hence, the losers talk themselves into crashing the New Years party hosted by the popular kids … where they can be losers in fresh and exciting new ways. Actually, Danny does pretty well. Eli comes off as a pathetic perv … and given that this character almost certainly describes Kyle Mooney as a teen I can’t help wondering if the director intended to make himself look so bad.
Thankfully, Eli is saved when the clock hits midnight and the machines all turn on their owners. A fan blade immediately takes out one teen, then everybody waits patiently to watch a toy car slowly pick ou
t a popular kid and burn his face off. Geez, kid, the lighter and hairspray wasn’t a clue that maybe you should move? At that point, the party panics while every piece of tech with a chip suddenly decides to kill humanity. And not a single moment of the slaughter seems anything other than silly.
I know this is the intention. That’s why your film got more than zero stars, but, Kyle, you have to know that your hero is a wimpy perv, your threats to mankind are on the order of sharply ejected CDs and robots made entirely of the wire tangle you have in the back of your TV. Those aren’t real threats. You must know this. The real threat, however, is AI tech that didn’t exist in 2000. Sure, I guess we can assume a little license, but then you must know how easy it would have been to defeat 2000-level AI, right? Right?
Bottom line is Y2K had a few laughs – smoking kush in the porn room at the local video store and a storied condom found in a copy of The Giver at the school library. Those are nice touches, but your hero sucks and your threat is laughably lame. There just isn’t enough here to justify the time investment.
There once was a loser, Eli
Who gave a house party a try
Then the world went to Hell
And he thought, “this is swell”
Cuz I watched hot girl’s bf just die
Rated R, 91 Minutes
Director: Kyle Mooney
Writer: Kyle Mooney, Evan Winter
Genre: Things that both didn’t happen and wouldn’t
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Losers
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: the kind of girl who wouldn’t date a loser even if the world were ending
