Y2K dials up only fleeting moments of apocalyptic fun (Review)
By Lisa Laman
In the early 2010s, Steven Spielberg was set to direct Robopocalypse, a film adaptation of the Daniel H. Wilson novel of the same name. The project would've starred Chris Hemsworth and Anne Hathaway and chronicled human beings on the run from machines that are rebelling against humans. I swear to God, at one point I thought I saw some leaked storyboard art that depicted humans being chased by various machines like iron curlers and CD players, but maybe I just dreamed it. I can't find it anywhere. Anyway, Spielberg’s vision of robots duking it out with humans never came to pass. But that doesn’t mean that basic concepts have gone unfulfilled in cinema.
Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut Y2K (which, to be clear, has absolutely nothing to do with the book Robopocalypse) now lets audiences finally see appliances rampage against their human owners. If you ever wanted The Brave Little Toaster to get sadistic, Y2K is for you.
Y2K continues Mooney's fascination with older pop culture, a trend reflected in his various Saturday Night Live sketches absurdly poking fun at old sitcoms. In those segments, a pastiche on the Tom Hanks alcoholic episode of Family Ties would culminate in Larry David stabbing Mooney, blood spilling everywhere, and then everyone drinking together. Another parody, this time of 1980s inspirational sports movie, had lots of amusing inexplicable gags, including a humorous appearance by a critter that looked like Mac from Mac and Me. There’s a streak of unpredictability to Mooney’s approach to yesteryear that makes Y2K’s opening scenes so strange.
A weirdly cookie-cutter artistic endeavor from Mooney
Audiences meet 17-year-old protagonist Eli (Jaeden Martell) as he prepares for New Year's Eve in 1999, and everything about this kid's world seems so strangely standard. It's a little uncomfortable honestly to see a Mooney directorial effort featuring Tim Heidecker in a small role (as Eli's straight-laced dad) that has no edge or understated weirdness to it. If you watched the early scenes of Eli riding around his neighborhood or hanging out with best buddy Danny (Julian Dennison) devoid of context, it would seem like just a run-of-the-mill teenager comedy. That’s such a weird contrast to earlier Mooney creative endeavors, where even the establishing shots would subvert expectations. So begins Y2K’s odd dedication to functioning as a straightforward movie, its greatest and most fatal shortcoming.
Eli and Danny eventually decide to go to a rockin’ New Year’s Eve party in the hopes that the former character might be able to finally smooch long-time crush Laura (Rachel Zegler). However, once the clock strikes midnight, all the machines in the house go wild. Y2K, the concept that technology would go berserk once the new millennium started, has come true in this universe. People start viciously dying through remote-controlled cars, blenders, and microwaves (among other entities) coming to life and slaughtering folks. Eventually, Eli and Laura escape the house with a handful of other survivors, like abrasive bully Ash (Lachlan Watson) and wannabe rapper CJ (Daniel Zolghadri). Now they’ve got to work together to survive the robopocalypse, er, apocalypse.
Once our lead characters evade a bunch of bloodthirsty machines, Mooney and Evan Winter's screenplay slows down for a lengthy sequence where everyone talks about their backstories and ambitions. These are by far the worst Y2K scenes. All these teenagers are just uninteresting and their vulnerable chatter is too derivative to engage the viewer. Scenes of Laura bemoaning her status as a “popular girl” or CJ trying to make Ash realize how toxic their friends were feel cribbed from an afterschool special. No distinctive comedic embellishments punctuate these intimate moments and they’re nowhere near absorbing enough to make up for the dearth of creativity.
The worst of these characters is, unfortunately, Eli. When Danny implores Eli to “just be you," I have to question who exactly Eli is. He’s a blank cipher character without many specific characteristics to speak of beyond a generic crush on Laura. That’s not an ideal figure to hinge a movie on! Y2K’s insistence on playing things so conventionally means that there’s a lack of exciting surrealist gags to compensate for Eli’s shallowness. In the pantheon of modern teenage movie protagonists, he’s not even 1/10th as interesting as the leads of teen films Dope, The Edge of Seventeen, or The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
If there's any part where Y2K comes alive, it's when machines are killing people and in the practical effects used to realize increasingly towering robotic baddies. Relying on more tangible practical effects brings some urgency to the proceedings that the characters can't deliver. By far the highlight of Y2K, though, is Fred Durst in a cameo appearance as himself. A willingness to poke fun at himself, not to mention letting Durst inhabit a world-weary apocalypse survivor persona, makes his presence a blast. It’s also a nice touch that his role here has enough fun standalone gags that you don’t need to be a Limp Bizkit die-hard fan to titter at his screentime. Between this and I Saw the TV Glow, I for one welcome our new Durst cinema overlord.
Also standing out among the cast is Lachlan Watson delivering the most fully realized and amusing personality of the teenage leads. Talented performers Zegler and Dennison also inject whatever life they can into their characters. The presence of such actors and fleetingly amusing deaths ensure Y2K is far from a waste of time. Unfortunately, it is a waste of potential, not to mention a weirdly cookie-cutter artistic endeavor from Mooney. A movie where a blender decimates a man’s nuts shouldn’t so rigidly adhere to conventional narrative impulses! A greater level of anarchic fun, or at least dialing back the corny sentimentality, could’ve made Y2K both something special and a worthy substitute for Robopocalypse.