Computer Holocaust 2000
Kyle Mooney made his name on YouTube, spent years being underutilized on Saturday Night Live, and starred and co-wrote one weird, memorable movie: Brigsby Bear. Mooney played a young man who’d been raised in a bunker, educated and emotionally nourished by a fictional kids show called Brigsby Bear put on by his parents in a wildly unethical human experiment. That’s not a synopsis, that’s the setup: he emerges from his isolation and the fantasy continues. Mooney has many of the unfortunate cute, bordering on twee tics of his generation, my generation, and the one right below me (which includes the UHC assassin, who read Harry Potter, The Lorax, and LEGO books as an adult). He affects an anxiety-stricken stammer, plays idiots, and acts like a mentally-disabled moron. Because all of that is supposedly funnier than being “mean.”
But Brigsby Bear was just as disturbing as it was “cute,” an American Dogtooth made on an impressive scale that was nevertheless ignored in 2017 and hasn’t attracted any kind of cult fervor along the lines of Under the Silver Lake. Brigsby Bear doesn’t have any “mysteries” to solve, it’s just a sad, dark comedy, an endangered species in 2017 and all but extinct now.
I thought Mooney directed Brigsby Bear, but the new Y2K is his directorial debut. He once again co-writes and plays a small part as an elder stoner. While Hollywood inexplicably continues to make period pieces about the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, there are relatively few 1990s and 2000s movies. Despite the fact that audiences raised on grunge and, later, boy bands and girl pop superstars are entering middle age, they’re still ignored by corporations that know there’s only so much money to be made off of Millennials.
Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, Lachlan Watson, and Mason Gooding star as high school seniors at a party on New Year’s Eve 1999/2000. The first 20 minutes of Y2K play out like most teen comedies of the time, to the point that you begin to wonder whether or not these pounding cliches (emphasized by the mere presence of Tim Heidecker as the Dad, playing it totally straight) will give way to something more interesting. As soon as it hits midnight, everything goes wrong: Y2K is real. The computers are taking over. Kids get killed by appliances, machines, their own panic; central characters die halfway through; the cliches keep pounding on as the movie gets stranger and stranger somehow. The ending features Katamari Damacy-style robots deactivated as microchip implanted parents stand around collecting their children at the local high school. At the same time, it’s as cookie cutter as it gets: formerly disapproving parents reconciled, guy kisses girl, the ones we lost remembered.
Y2K is a baffling collision of acutely realized period accuracy, terrifying techno apocalypse, and teen romance that’s written so plainly and broadly it only reinforces the strangeness of the rest of the film. Unfortunately, Y2K fails the watch test: when my friend took a breather outside after seeing one too many mice in the theater, I saw there was half an hour left in the movie. This was before Fred Durst showed up. No 95-minute movie should fail the watch test, especially one as out there as this; but it’s not the kookiness, it’s Mooney’s reliance on placeholder dialogue, placeholder scenes. They have the effect of heightening the doomed fantasy of the rest of the film, but I doubt they were intentionally written so baldly. In a year full of relatively low-budget horror films (Y2K cost $15 million), this will be lost in the mix. I just hope there are more movies set in the 1990s soon: the soundtracks will be great and there will be ZERO chance of hearing either CCR or Bruce Springsteen.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith