Y2K: A Disastrous Comedy, and That's a Good Thing.
Y2K is the case when a movie is not great but still a fun time regardless.
As a production company, A24 has made it no secret that they want to become more commercially buyable in the years to come. This isn’t a bad thing, as long as the films A24 continues to produce provide the artistic flair (or at least some of them do), I don’t mind them trying to make some money in the process to keep the lights on. I love Ari Aster’s mind bending Beau is Afraid but let’s be real on paper that movie was going to lose the studio a lot of money. I love niche films but they are niche for a reason, the masses won’t rush out to them.
The acquisition of Kyle Mooney’s latest film Y2K seemed like a play to appeal to a more broad audience with a crazy apocalyptic comedy. The film is a take on the turn of the century, in 1999 some people were concerned that when we hit the year 2000 all technology would go dark, leaving us back to the stone age. Some crazier conspiracies believed technology would come to life and try to irradiate the human race, which is what this film is cheekily making fun of. The film stars two high school nerds, Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julien Dennison) who decide instead of watching movies on New Years Eve to go crash a party. When they go to this party, when the clock strikes midnight all the technology comes to life and starts to kill the teens one by one. Tomagachi has never been scarier than it has been here.
Kyle Mooney is one of the funnier people to be on Saturday Night Live in the last ten years and his transition to film has been good. The movie he wrote and starred in Brigsby Bear is a strikingly original and poignant film. Y2K is certainly a step down from that film, but, in my opinion if a film knows exactly what it is and has fun with it and connects with my sense of humor I will give it a pass. I had a lot of fun with Y2K. For me, this film felt like if really talented people had made films like Sharknado or Birdemic. The plotting of this movie is nonsensical, you cannot think about the events that happen in this movie for more than two seconds without the logistics of the film falling completely apart. This is okay because the film has a sense of humor about itself.
Humor is subjective and I can see someone watching this movie and not being on its same wavelength at all. Not all of the jokes here work in my opinions, there’s some groans but the velocity of some of these jokes felt pretty inspired. These are hard jokes and punchlines to pull off and some of them really got me. I’m a hard laugh when it comes to movies, and there’s several jokes about the state of film, music and Limp Biscuit in this movie that made me erupt in laughter and I found myself smiling throughout. I recently wrote a movie about the power of thoughtless cinema only based on vibes and Y2K certainly fits the bill. This is not an intelligent movie or an artistically sound one, but it would be perfect background noise and we need some good background noise movies.
The best part of the film is its first twenty minutes before it becomes a horror movie. Seeing these kids run around in the 1999 era was delightful. If this just wanted to be a coming of age slice of life Richard Linklater esque films about kids seeing the beginning of a new millennium, we could have had a really introspective film about a bygone era. Once the film takes a hard pivot into its genre roots is when it becomes a bit of a mess. There’s actually a lot of really great practical effects work here and I was stunned by the gore. There’s not much of it but when this film gets bloody it doesn’t shine away from the more grotesque aspects. One of the best sequences in the film is our main characters running away from machines, who are all killing off teens in the craziest ways imaginable. It’s actually scary and they build dread very well.
The film is admittedly a tonal mess. Horror comedies have been able to balance drama and comedy with ease. Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead is a perfect example of a horror film that is hilarious and witty but gets increasingly darker and darker with true dramatic beats that resonate. In Y2K, I actually found the dramatic beats to be quite compelling. They kill off a character early in the film that surprised me and it made me jaw drop on the floor a little. It’s a risky move for this silly movie to make and that moment gave me actual chills. Then there’s other moments where characters are being goofy and dumb, not really taking the presence of the violent technology uprising seriously. It’s a weird and jarring tonal mix that sometimes makes the films pacing feel off.
However, I was still with this silly and stupid movie until the very end. I resonated with Eli as a character and routed for him to get his first kiss with his dream girl Laura, played by the internets favorite Gen Z’er Rachel Zegler. I was chuckling along to the absurdity of the film, I found myself tapping my foot along to a deliciously nostalgic 90’s soundtrack. It captured the aesthetic of late 90’s and early 2000’s with ease which gave me a weird personal connection to the whole project, even if I was just a baby when 1999 happened. I felt this films nostalgia for it’s time period. Y2K is a mess, but it’s a glorious mess of a movie I can find myself revisiting in the future when I need something to not think about for ninety minutes. I think somewhere in this freak of nature of a movie is a great one and I wonder if there’s scenes on the cutting room floor that would help this movie, but as it is my only defense of my positive review is this - I had a lot of fun and sometimes that’s all you need a movie to be.
