Best friends Eli and Danny aren’t the most popular kids in their high school.
Far from it.
They don’t fit in with any of the school’s established cliques: the jocks, preps, punks, geeks, skaters or stoners. They really only have each other. Sure, Eli maintains a chatroom friendship with Laura, a brainy and popular girl in his class, but he’s hardly talked to her outside of those safe, digital confines.
Eli and Danny are dissatisfied with their current social standing. They’re tired of being losers. Being bullied and ignored. It’s the eve of a new millennium, after all. The year 2000 is right around the corner.
What better time to turn the page and step into a new (and hopefully more popular) chapter of life?
And wouldn’t you know it, one of the most popular kids in school is throwing a New Year’s Eve bash at his house … with no parents in sight. Drinking, drugs, hooking up—it’s all on the table. Everyone’s going to be there. Laura, too. Maybe Eli will work up the nerve to talk to her.
Little do they know that when the clock strikes midnight, their computers will succumb to a Y2K virus—a murderous artificial intelligence that has, shall we say, a less than glowing view of humanity. Eli and Danny are about to have bigger problems to worry about than high school popularity.
Apocalyptic-level problems, if the machines have their way …
Eli and Danny share a close friendship. Danny says that Eli was the only person who befriended him after he emigrated to the United States with his mother. He also tries to encourage the painfully shy Eli, telling him to be himself around others, whether they think he’s cool or not.
The survivors of the machine rampage slowly form a bond, despite coming from vastly different social circles. Eli tells his parents that he loves them. Someone comforts the mother of his deceased friend. Later, he visits the grave of that friend to pay his respects.
Laura uses her skills in computer coding to help save the day.
Danny crassly tells Eli that “God is “f—ing smiling down on [him].”
This teen horror-comedy rarely misses a chance to throw sexual content into its situations and dialogue. The most explicit instance of that here is a clip from a pornographic film pops up a few times in the film. It shows a man and woman engaging in graphic sex. Garrett, a local stoner and video store manager, invites Eli and Danny into what he calls the “champagne room,” a backroom packed with pornographic movies. (We see glimpses of explicit VHS covers.)
Eli and Danny talk about who in their class they want to have sex with. They pass a condom back and forth throughout the movie, with the hope that one of them will finally use it. They download a picture of a naked woman onto Danny’s computer (and we see her exposed breasts).
Ash, a member of the punk-skater clique, hints that she might be gay. She also adds that even though she “hooked up” with a guy once, she “[doesn’t] know if I’m into guys.” Eli’s parents ask Eli if he’ll get a New Year’s Eve kiss from someone. His father tells his son about his wife’s eagerness for sex when they met in college.
At a party, a teen girl straddles her boyfriend on a bed; both are in their underwear. Several teens make out. A guy’s pants bulge suggestively. An adolescent girl’s cleavage is prominently displayed. Two characters kiss. Another thrusts his hips while dancing. Someone tells his friend to “stop flirting with my mom.”
Teens make crude (and abundant) references to a variety of sexual terms and situations. Bill Clinton is referred to as “President B—job.” In a post-credits scene, blockily rendered robot women dancing suggestively in swimwear.
Once the machines become sentient and kick off their violent rampage, Y2K leans into gory, over-the-top violence in an attempt to elicit gasps and laughs.
We see several people (mostly teenagers) die in a variety of gruesome ways. Someone is burned alive. Another’s face is mutilated by an electric razor. Others get maimed by blenders, garbage disposals, hedge trimmers and more. A kid’s head is microwaved. A machine drills into someone’s head. A man loses an arm and then his head. A singer talks about his bandmates being killed by the machines. Spatters of blood accompany every gory kill.
A character is stabbed and bleeds to death. A skater tries to grind on a toppled basketball pole, slips, cracks his head on the asphalt and dies. We see the pool of blood that forms around his head. One of the machines holds a girl by the throat and headbutts someone else. A portable toilet crashes down a hillside with kids inside it.
We see the effects of the machine-wrought devastation on the town. Buildings burn and bodies are scattered everywhere. Airplanes collide in midair and explode. A computer shows a crude animation of people with their heads on fire. A group smashes up a video store.
A bully hits Eli in the crotch. Laura creates a short animation that shows her knocking someone’s head off in cartoonish fashion.
We hear Jesus’ name misused five times. God’s name is abused seven times, sometimes paired with “d–n.” The f-word is used more than 120 times in dialogue, not including even more uses in the soundtrack throughout the film. There are about 40 uses of the s-word. Characters say “h—” or “h–a” nine times.
“B–ch” is heard at least 14 times. We hear additional uses of “a–,” “a–hole” and “bada–.” Crass and vulgar language involving a variety of sexual slang terms for male and female anatomy is heard frequently.
There are also a handful of uses of “sucks,” “butt,” “pee” and “p-ss.” One person is called “numb nuts.”
A little girl gives someone the “loser sign.” Another person uses a crude hand gesture.
Drug and alcohol use (again, mostly by teenagers) is frequent in Y2K. Eli and Danny are offered drugs in the backroom of a video store. Eli declines but Danny partakes; we see the effects of Danny’s ensuing drug trip. The boys discuss a classmate who is said to have “holes in her brain” from using ecstasy.
Later, Eli breaks into a liquor cabinet. He and Danny get drunk before going to a New Year’s Eve party. At the party, we see several high schoolers drinking and smoking. One teen calls for shots. Someone unknowingly drinks alcohol from a water bottle.
Laura and her friends do a “booze bolt,” stealing liquor from a convenience store. We hear slang terms for marijuana. Two characters discuss the first time they “got baked”—one was in sixth grade at the time—and one reminisces about “rolling the scaggiest joint.” Later, those same characters pass around a joint while enveloped in a cloud of smoke.
Garrett seems perpetually high. He offers a spread of recreational drugs, including marijuana, mushrooms and cold medicine. Later, he takes an entire bag of mushrooms. We see a large, glass bong. Someone talks about “tripping out.” A stoner offers someone’s mother a joint, and she smokes it.
A few songs heard throughout the movie reference drinking, such as Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” and Semisonic’s “Closing Time.”
Danny tells a group about how he once peed in Eli’s drink, after which Eli unwittingly drank it. This story embarrasses Eli (though that was not, apparently, Danny’s intent) and their classmates start calling Eli “p-ss mouth.”
A stoner asks, “Is it all good if you’ve never met your dad?” While tumbling down a hill in a portable toilet, the kids inside are doused with liquid sewage. After their initial bloody rampage, the machines round up the remaining humans to be assimilated in as part of a “techno-evolution” in which the humans will serve the computers instead of the other way around.
Parents in this movie are either absent or negligent, with little concern regarding what their kids are up to. Kids are bullied. As mentioned above, a group of kids steal beer for a party.
Someone laments sounding “like Tipper Gore.” We see part of Bill Clinton’s presidential Y2K address from November 1999.
For those who may be unfamiliar, the Y2K, the common abbreviation for “the year 2000 software problem,” concerns of the late 1990s revolved around the potential problems computer programs would have switching from the year 1999 to 2000. Since many programs tracked a given year with only two digits instead of the full four (“99” as opposed to “1999”), some speculated that problems could arise if computers were unable to distinguish the year 2000 from 1900—both represented as “00” in the two-digit system.
Believe it or not, this small data error was considered to have the potential to collapse digital infrastructures worldwide and cost billions of dollars to remedy. Some considered Y2K a potentially apocalyptic event.
In the film Y2K, however, director and Saturday Night Live alum Kyle Mooney opts to go in a different direction. Instead of a meager two digits collapsing the world’s digital architecture, this alternate Y2K story creates a sentient artificial intelligence bent on humanity’s slaughter and subjugation. (How exactly this happens is not explored.)
The result is a much wackier take on the fledging millennium’s would-be crisis. And it gives the film the excuse to pack the screen with killer robots and gross-out gore. But that’s not even half of Y2K’s content problems. The filmmakers also seek to infuse this teen horror-comedy with explicit sexuality, harsh language and frequent drug and alcohol use in a manner akin to 2007’s Superbad.
The real Y2K turned out to be much ado about nothing. In the case of the movie Y2K, I would share a similar conclusion: Nothing to see here.
Nothing worth your time, at least.
Bret loves a good story—be it a movie, show, or video game—and enjoys geeking out about things like plot and story structure. He has a blast reading and writing fiction and has penned several short stories and screenplays. He and his wife love to kayak the many beautiful Colorado lakes with their dog.
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