The Rise of the Machines

I’ll be up front and note that I hadn’t heard about Y2K until recently. I mean, yes, I’m old enough that I actually lived through the period of 1999 transitioning into 2000 when everyone thought the world was going to end because all the computers would crash out and die and we’d end up living in caves, discussing that time when we thought we were the superior beings because we had iPods. Spoiler, we didn’t end up in caves. Sorry if you thought otherwise. We will all just have to dream for that future…

Anyway, the fact that the 2000s transition did lead to anything is the joke of Y2K, the comedy film written by Evan Winter and Kevin Mooney and directed by Mooney. In effect, the premise is, “what if the Year 2000 really did lead to the apocalypse,” and then the film gets crazier, and zanier, from there. It’s a solid idea, but one that apparently didn’t resonate with audiences in 2024. Although, in fairness, production studio A24 didn’t do the film any favors releasing it in December when audiences were primed for holiday favorites and feel good movies, along with the studio putting out the last of their Academy Awards contenders. Up against that slate, a little apocalypse comedy certainly would get lost.

But then, I’m not really certain this film really would have done well in any setting. It’s a strange little comedy, part monster film, part end of the world story, and part stoner comedy, all mashed together with a varying tone that wobbles wildly. You can go from a scene where people lament the friends that were killed along the way, and then suddenly Fred Durst shows up to be snarky and rap a song. Does it work? Kind of, but it’s the sort of film that is going to find a very small, very slight, die hard audience while everyone else shrugs and moves along. Whether you end up in the die hard camp is really the question, and I’m not even certain that this review can tell you that. Hell, I’m still not sure how I feel about the film.

The movie focuses on Eli (Jaeden Martell), a high school wallflower that likes to spend his days making custom action figures and hanging out with his friend, Danny (Julian Dennison). He also spends time online chatting with Laura (Rachel Zegler), the girl that runs the school’s website, who Eli secretly loves. He’d do a lot to date Laura, and when it sounds like she’s dumped her boyfriend right before New Year’s Eve, Eli tries to work up the nerve to talk to her and ask her out. He fails.

Still, Danny sort of has his back. He cajoles his friend into going to a New Years Eve party, one where all the cool kids from school will be, Laura included. However, during the party, Danny tells all kinds of embarrassing stories about Eli, making Danny look cool and Eli look awful. This causes a big fight between the two, and Eli is ready to storm off and spend the night alone… except then midnight rolls in and suddenly everything goes pear shaped. The power flickers, the tech sputters, and suddenly the machines rise. All the technology in the house masses itself into a killer robot and it goes to work eliminating the humans. Now Eli, Danny, Laura, and a few survivors have to band together to figure out what’s going on and survive.

There’s a lot going on in Y2K, from minute one, and not all of it works. Is it a coming of age story? Is it an apocalypse adventure? Is it a horror film? Well, yes, it’s sort of all of that. Hell, Wikipedia has its genre listed as a “apocalyptic-teen-science fiction comedy-adventure-horror film”, which is just crazy. It’s all those things, all mashed together, and yet it also kind of fails at being any of those things, at least for any kind of sustained period of time. Mashing genres together is fine, but it takes a deft hand to actually make that kind of adventure work and Y2K lacks that hand, if I’m being really blunt.

Sometimes the film is a horror movie, like during the initial rise of the machines. There, the gore is turned up, the characters are screaming and running, and there are some effective jump scares. I’d heard it was a comedy but this sequence plays about as far from comedy as you could get. It then takes a turn for drama as key characters die and others lament their passing. But then almost immediately someone dies stupidly and it’s both a joke and not at the same time. This is later followed by a guy dying in the dumbest fashion possible, and then it’s clearly played for a joke, and it makes you wonder just what the creators of the film were thinking.

The concept of Y2K is sound. What if the year 2000 actually ushered in an apocalypse is a funny idea that has solid legs to it. I think you could get a really good apocalypse-comedy out of that idea, one that could fill a full script for a film. The unfortunate part is that the creators here couldn’t just stick to that idea. They didn’t make the apocalypse but funny, or scary, or dramatic. They did all the things at the same time, mashing it together with stark tonal shifts that leave the audience wondering just what kind of film they’re watching. It’s discomfort without purpose, the sense that the film doesn’t even know what it wants to be.

Y2K is an “and then” story. And then this happens, and then this other thing happens, and then that happens. Things keep happening just to move the characters forward, but it all happens without purpose. It’s fine to include an “and then” beat in a film, but what Y2K is missing is the “because” that comes after. “And then the characters watch their friend die, and because of that they realize… something.” That sense of purpose is missing. The film never uses its events to further the plot or bring a goal in sight. It just does things for the sake of doing them.

The film does eventually find the plot near the end, right around the time Fred Durst appears, but I was so tired of the movie at that point I found I couldn’t even laugh at the incongruity of this dude being in the film. He comes in, performs his cover of George Michael’s “Faith” (which is weird on its own because why that song out of everything Limp Bizkit released?), and then the kids save the day. I was happy the film was ending at that point because any good will the concept had earned at the start had been totally wasted by the film’s faffing about, lurching between scenes without ever doing anything.

The fault is with the story and the director. I feel like the script needed to be edited, reworked to bring better focus on the beats that mattered. But the director also needed to realize, while they were orchestrating all of this, that the film needed to be reworked on the fly. Scenes need to have their tone shifted, ideas needed to be bandied about. The actors in the film do fine work, but even they seem lost switching between comedy, horror, action, drama, back and forth over and over. It’s a tough kind of film to perform in, and when even Rachel Zeigler (who I was just complimenting as the one bright point in Disney’s Snow White remake) seems lost and dull here, you know something has gone wrong.

Y2K is a film I really wanted to like. I saw reviews online that praised the film, calling it weird, silly fun and I was on board with a weird, silly movie about the apocalypse. But the opening of the film is so wildly uneven that my wife checked out within minutes, and I only struggled through to the end to see if, somehow, it got better. I wanted to understand why people were raving about this movie. I still don’t know. There’s a good idea buried somewhere in this film, but it just didn’t work for me. Maybe it will for you, but I absolutely understand if, after this review, you skip it entirely. I wish I had.