Y2K (2024) Review

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It's New Years Eve 1999 and moments after the clock strikes midnight, the technology of the world comes to life and begins attacking humanity.  A group of high school students have to work together to try to survive and stop the computers from taking over the world.


What Works:

So the computer creatures that become the main antagonists of the movie actually look pretty cool.  It's a wide variety of computer monitors and other pieces of technology combined together to form Frankenstein's Monster from the year 2000.  They look great, I just wish they had gotten more to do in the movie so we could see the greatness in action.

Finally, I chucked two or three times during this movie, with one of them being a genuine laugh.  One of the idiot characters of the movie gets killed by trying to grind on his rollerblades.  He immediately falls over and breaks his neck.  In the middle of the Y2K apocalypse, this moron dies while being a dumbass and it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.  That's actually very on brand for the era and it got a genuine laugh out of me.


What Sucks:

Like I mentioned above, it would have been nice to see the computers actually do something.  They mostly just stand around and look intimidating.  That's kinda the problem with this movie as a whole.  The premise is great, but they don't do much with it.  Besides the house party sequence, there really isn't much else of interest happening in the movie.  I was waiting for more cool and creative kills with the computers having fun with various machines and appliances used to slaughter.  That happened far less often than you would guess in a movie like this.  Maybe if the film had a bigger budget, they could have actually had some fun.

So, we don't get much in terms of computer action, which means the movie has to fall back onto the characters to make the story interesting.  It tries to do that, but fails miserably because the characters suck.  The two leads, played by Jaeden Martell and Rachel Zegler, are mostly just boring, but the side characters are all unlikable pricks or annoying attempts at comic relief.  There's a world in which that can work, but it doesn't here.  There isn't anything to get invested in.  The characters are so boring and unlikable that I didn't care if they lived or died.

The message of the movie is to show that despite our differences, humans can work together to defeat the computers.  I can see that working if they went for a more Breakfast Club situation.  Have characters from various 90's cliques having to work together in their fight for survival and along the way they learn that they are more alike than they realize.  That's what the movie attempts to do, but falls completely flat.  We're introduced to the various cliques at the house party sequence, but only two people from the cliques are actually main characters.  We have one popular girl and one punk girl.  The rest of the cliques are discarded and not important.  And there is another character CJ (Daniel Zolghadri), who isn't properly introduced.  He's just kinda there.  There's really only four key characters who are a part of the survival story after the house party and  there was potential to do a lot more.

Finally, most of the humor falls completely flat, especially once Fred Durst shows up as himself.  I have nothing against Limp Bizkit, but the jokes about the band got old fast.  It's clear that the filmmakers love Limp Bizkit.  Good for them.  They let their love for the band make the movie worse.


Verdict:

Y2K has a neat premise, cool monster designs, and two or three funny moments.  It's enough to make a solid trailer, which worked as it got me to see this movie, but it has nothing else going for it.  The computers don't actually do very much, the story is mostly boring, the characters suck, and the humor is almost nonexistent.  The 90 minute runtime felt painfully long.  If you're a Limp Bizkit fan, you might get something out of this, but for everyone else...this was a rough watch.  

 2/10: Awful 

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