Party Like It’s Y2K In A24’s New Comedy

I suppose we’ve come to the point where we can make a Superbad-like party comedy set close to the time when Superbad was actually made. Y2K, from A24, is a new movie drenched in late 90s nostalgia about two boys who crash a rager. One came with the goal of finally asking out his crush, but they both have their eyes on the giant bottles of booze. Since this is A24, you’re waiting for the twist….and that’s when the lights go out.

Oh, right….THAT thing.

For those who weren’t there, I’m assuming all of you, a major source of anxiety leading up to New Years Eve 1999 was the “Y2K Bug” — a flaw in the foundation of computer chips where just two numbers were used for the year, originally to save space. Despite chips becoming more complex, this was never changed, and there was a danger that any computer with a clock in it would count from 1999 to 1900, get confused, and bug out.

The threat from this bug squished what was supposed to be the party night to end all party nights — Prince wrote a song about how legendarily epic New Years Eve 1999 was going to be years before it happened. But we didn’t really get to celebrate this once-in-a-thousand-year event quite as hard as we’d hoped, because there was this fear in the back of our minds that civilization was going to end the next day. Seattle actually cancelled their Y2K party over this.

Nothing happened, of course. But while the fear was overblown, it wasn’t all hype — there were quite a few electronics people relied on that would’ve been susceptible to the bug. What happened was a massive government / corporate initiative that fixed the bug before we got there. To quote Futurama, “when you do things right, people won’t be sure you did anything at all.”

Y2K assumes nobody fixed anything AND that the bug turned all turn-of-the-century electronics evil and murderous. But what could they really do — kill us with VHS tapes? That’s actually one thing that happens in this trailer. Turns out the machines can get creative!

Y2K will arrive December 6, whether the world is ready for it or not. Will humanity hang on long enough to obsess over the Elian Gonzales custody battle a couple months later? You must buy a ticket to find out.