‘Y2K’: Premise and Nothing Else
This dumb comedy didn’t have to be quite so dumb, but all they care about is the concept.
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If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you know that I am a sucker for dumb horror movies1. Often, the dumber the better—which explains why I bothered to watch Y2K, Kyle Mooney’s oddball retro effort, a film rocking a 42% Rotten Tomato score as I write this2. Of course, one reason I love watching terrible, recent movies like this is so I can write about them, because mediocre movies often have a lot to teach me about how not to write a story3.
The basic premise of Y2K is interesting: It imagines an alternate timeline where the Y2K problem of 1999—which involved an obscure programming problem that supposedly would cause systems all over the world to crash when the calendar flipped over to the year 20004—actually resulted in disaster and the end of the world. It takes it in a jokey direction involving sentient technology and a lot of teenagers being killed in gruesome, Maximum Overdrive-esque ways, but that’s not the worst premise for a story5.
Yeah, it’s not great. But the gonzo nature of that plot isn’t really the problem—there’s a version of that story that’s sharp and hilarious, and there are a few decent gags in here. The real problem is that the story isn’t interested in anything but the premise6. Not the characters. Not telling a story, really. It just wants to throw up a bunch of 1999 pop culture references7 and revel in a world that descended into chaos on January 1, 2000.
Um, Don't Admit That We're Losers
You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned a character (or the actors who portray them), which I normally do in these ridiculous little essays. But there’s no reason to, here, because the film barely bothers to sketch them out. Mainly, it relies on references to teen movies to sketch out a bare-bones universe. The warmly knowing parents straight out of Easy A, the wild high school party from just about any teen movie, ever, the gang of stoner bullies, the asshole jocks who have all the pretty girls—it’s all just quick-cut signifiers to give you the sense that there are characters because you can sense the ghostly outline of older, better movies8.
As for world-building, why bother when you have a mish-mash of every cultural trend of 1999? The party scene in the beginning is explicit in its disinterest in actually building a coherent universe, offering a party where skaters are all in one room, swing dancers in another9, stoners in this room, ravers in that one. The film makes a meal out of everything from burning a music CD to how it took ten minutes to download a single photo from the internet10, and that’s the extent of its world-building. The movie says, hey, it’s 1999, and that should be all you need to ground yourself in this story. It literally offers zero details about the people or the setting because it does not care about them at all11. It only cares about the premise.
He Was Alright, For A White Dude With Dreads
Once the film gets the tedious setup, with all its irritatingly lifted character beats12 and desultory work establishing the universe, it starts to have a little fun. Which makes sense, since all it cares about is its premise. Once we’re knee-deep in that premise things get a little looser and more entertaining, because this is clearly where all the energy is13.
There is a reason, of course, why we don’t just skip over character development or world-building, or ask an AI chatbot to just spin some up for us. That shit is important in the sense that it makes the reader/viewer care about what happens in the story and understand why things matter in the context of it. Skipping those steps just undermines everything else. It’s easy to fall into the trap of being so enamored by your idea that you forget to do the comparatively harder and less glamorous work of creating the infrastructure that will support the idea, and this movie should stand as an example of what happens when you give in to it14.
I am old enough to remember Y2K really well. Since I was broke and had a dial-up internet connection that required me to turn a crank by hand to connect, I wasn’t too worried about it15. Now? If my internet speed drops by 1% I have a mild panic attack. Age is a cruel monster.
NEXT WEEK: The White Lotus and Dumb Character Syndrome
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Just about all my preferences, opinions, and public actions can be explained with the simple phrase: “I am not very smart.”
If there was a Rotten Tomatoes for people, I suspect I’d be very under water.
Of course, no one is giving me tens of millions of dollars to make films, so maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am? Nah, that doesn’t sound right.
This was real, and involved the way dates were stored in early computer systems, but was way overstated and misunderstood. But believe me, people panicked for a while there.
Unless you’re under the age of 40 and don’t really remember Y2K as a thing at all, of course.
In the same way that when I meet you for drinks I’m not interested in anything but the drinks. This is why my writing career hasn’t gone as planned: People talk to me about my future and I’m just sitting there with the Scotch bit from Anchorman in my head.
The presence of Fred Durst in this film is a crime.
Maybe I’m just bitter because no one invites me to house party ragers any more. I miss them so much.
I mean, I know that swing dancing was a fad for a minute, but did kids actually show up to school dressed in Zoot Suits? <doubt>
Yes: Porn was very frustrating back in 1999. Or so I’m told.
It cares so little, it literally kills several characters it took the time to introduce within the first half hour, as if daring us to complain.
Seriously, The Kid Laroi is in this, for some reason, and he plays a typical jock asshole character that is so typical jock asshole you get the feeling that’s all they wrote in the script: TYPICAL JOCK ASSHOLE SAYS TYPICAL JOCK ASSHOLE THING.
Similarly, once I am halfway through a bottle of whiskey I become much more interesting and hilarious. Right? Don’t answer that.
Also a warning about assuming that the mere presence of Fred Durst is hilarious.
What was I going to lose? A bunch of Aldus PageMaker files for my zine The Inner Swine and the nude fake photo of Bea Arthur I spent 2 hours downloading? Pffft.