Summary
The trailer for A24’s new sci-fi horror-comedyY2Khas dropped, and I don’t think it nails the actual culture of the ’90s or the end-of-millennium panic caused by the Y2K bug. Co-written and directed bySNLalum Kyle Mooney (his cowriter was Evan Winter),the 1990s-setY2Ktrailerimagines a world in which a New Year’s Eve house party goes terribly wrongwhen an exaggerated version of the Y2K bug actually does happen.When midnight strikes, the electronics in the house wake up with a new, murderous intent.
Using the premise of what it might look like had the Y2K bug really come to fruition is an interesting setup. And from the trailer, I do thinkthe simply-titledY2Kcould be a lot of fun as a disaster comedy in the vein ofThis Is The Endmeets a slasher movie. Even so,the ’90s vibes of the movie are completely off,with everything from the hairstyles, to the production design, to howY2K’s cast of teen charactersspeak and interact with each other. It’s trying, but it just doesn’t get the teen culture of the ’90s right, and I’d know seeing as how I was a teen in the ’90s.
Sidebar here for the 35-and-under crowd: The Y2K bug was a potential problem in the way computers stored information in the ancient days of the 1990s. “Y2K” stood for “Year 2000,” a year that, thanks to the limited data storage capabilities of the time, was represented as the 2-digit “00” rather than the 4-digit “2000.” The concern was that when the clocks rolled over at midnight on NYE 1999, computers potentially would have not been able to distinguish the year 2000 from 1900, thus crashing software and electronic systems all over the world. Yes, this was a real concern. No, I am not making it up.
Y2K Feels Like Gen Z Actors Trying To Portray Elder Millennials
It’s Always A Problem With Young Actors Playing Characters From A Decade Before They Were Born
My first impression upon watching theY2Ktrailer was that it seemed fun,but also that it felt like a bunch of Gen Z kids doing their best to replicate the ’90s but failing.It’s the problem that always happens when actors who were not yet alive in a certain era try to mimic people from that era when the actual people of that era are still around. Little details are off, leading to it feeling less like an immersive experience in a specific decade, but a cheap facsimile. Granted, 2024 is (horrifyingly) 25 years away from then-19-year-old me and memories fade, but certain things in the trailer just aren’t accurate.
We used technology in a way that was different than today’s Gen Z, so that moment stands out as inauthentic, a younger generation trying to guess how we would have acted and failing because they have no real frame of reference.
The biggest thing that sticks out to me is the way one character yells into what I can only assume is a camcorder about them partying for Y2K. It’s just not how we used cameras back then; instead, it feels very Gen Z TikTok-y. Selfies andthe modern way of speaking directly to audiences via self-recording just weren’t really a thing back then. Had they pulled out a disposable camera, that would have been perfect, but pulling out a camcorder would have gotten you marked as a narc, especially at a house party. We used technology in a way that was different than today’s Gen Z, so that moment stands out as inauthentic, a younger generation trying to guess how we would have acted and failing because they have no real frame of reference.
Y2K Review: Julian Dennison Is The Highlight Of A Messy Sci-Fi Horror Comedy That Loses Its Charm
Y2K will surely find an audience, but the nostalgia and a solid premise aren’t enough to make this a memorable watch.
The ’90s Details Are Too Obvious & Also Not Right
“Tubthumping”? In 1999? Please.
The ’90s details thrown into theY2Ktrailer aren’t quite right. For example, we’d all moved on from Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” by then, as it came out in 1997. Other songs were wildly more popular in the last months of the millennium: “Mambo No. 5” by Lou Bega, “Genie in a Bottle” by Christina Aguilera, or the Latin explosion that took over that year with singers like Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias. To be incredibly accurate,the trailer should have used “Smooth” by Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana.It is impossible to overstate the chokehold that song had on us all at the end of 1999.
’90s flashback: From the week of June 23, 2025 through the week of July 03, 2025, or 12 weeks straight, “Smooth” dominated the Billboard Hot 100. It was finally knocked out of the #1 spot by Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants.”
Likewise, the characters are all too clean and too perfectly styled, even when they’re trying to seem like they’re not. Our decade was the era in which grunge exploded, and1999 was a year caught squarely in the transition between the griminess of the grunge era and the shiny, futuristic techno-pop of the early 2000s.Kids just didn’t look that smooth and tidy back then. The hairstyles were different and more extreme, the clothes more distinct. If you want a good example of a teen house party movie that exaggerates, but still accurately captures the vibe of the era, 1998’sCan’t Hardly Waitis a good choice:
There are plenty of ’90s references thrown into theY2Ktrailer, which completely eschews the concept of “show, don’t tell.” The movie is telling us – very obviously and explicitly – that this is a ’90s movie, set in the ’90s, with ’90s stuff, and by the way,did it mention it’s set in the ’90s?From the opening seconds of the AOL dial-up screen, the trailer does its best to tell us that this is a movie set in the 1990s. The problem is that it doesn’t actually feel like it.
The Y2K Panic Was Real (But Not For The Movie’s Reasons)
In The End, It Was A Lot Of Nothing
Looking back, it seems wild that we were ever worried about the Y2K bug, which will sound objectively insane to anyone under the age of 35. The concern was there, but it wasn’t like we were thinking it might be the end of the world – not most of us, anyway. Ultimately, most of us who were teenagers didn’t really think the planet would be thrown into chaos –but we wouldn’t have taken your bet had you said absolutely nothing would be disrupted.
Don’t get me wrong – there were definitely people who were in full-blown panic mode, convinced everything could and would happen, from planes falling out of the sky, to banks accidentally zeroing out bank accounts, to cars crashing into each other, to hospital emergency equipment failing and patients dying. But most of us, especially those of us in our teens and 20s, just thought that, at most, our computer programs might get glitchy. Still, we weren’t sure what would happen,and we definitely weren’t having house parties that night.
I can tell you what did happen, though: nothing. For all the hype of potential calamity, the Y2K bug passed with not so much as a hiccup, likely thanks to the computer engineers and IT people who had been working overtime the past few months to avert any sort of downtime or software catastrophe. No computers became sentient and no machinery went allMaximum Overdriveon us. And I would know if they had,because I was a cast member at Disney World on New Year’s Eve 1999.
We went out thinking we might have to calm panicked parkgoers or restart malfunctioning rides. Instead, my coworkers and I sat with our backs against a brick ledge and stared at the sky while we talked about how bored we were.
I remember they handed us flashlights and whistles and sent us out into the park at ten to midnight, “just in case.” What a bunch of teenagers were supposed to do in the face of potential global meltdown, I don’t know.Maybe we could have whistled the Y2K bug to death.We went out thinking we might have to calm panicked parkgoers or restart malfunctioning rides. Instead, my coworkers and I sat with our backs against a brick ledge and stared at the sky while we talked about how bored we were, despite the occasional break of having to give a guest directions. Machines coming to life and trying to kill us was definitely not a concern.
It’s Weird Considering It Comes From Kyle Mooney & Jonah Hill
You’d Think They’d Know Better
The most baffling thing about the off-ness of theY2Ktrailer is thatSNLalum Kyle Mooney is the writer and director, and Jonah Hill is a producer. As two guys who were teenagers in 1999, they should know what it looked and felt like back then. But with Mooney’s influence,maybe that’s why it feels like a set piece and a sketch instead of a fully realized idea.The props feel like props; the costumes feel like costumes. Currently,Y2Kholds a 63% on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems about right. Hopefully, though, the trailer is misleading and the movie feels a lot more authentically ’90s, because right now, it feels like a movie that’s trying really, really hard to pretend it knows what Napster is and thatit remembers Woodstock ‘99, but failing.
Y2K
On the last night of 1999, two high school juniors crash a New Years Eve party, only to find themselves fighting for their lives in this dial-up disaster comedy.
