The trailer for the new sci-fi horror comedy from A24 Year 2000 has dropped, and I don’t think it captures the actual culture of the 90s or the panic caused by the Y2K bug at the end of the millennium. Co-writer and director: SNL Alum Kyle Mooney (his co-author was Evan Winter), who played in the 1990s Year 2000 Trailer imagines a world where a New Year’s Eve party goes terribly wrong if an exaggerated version of the Y2K bug actually occurs. When midnight strikes, the electronics in the house awaken with a new, murderous intent.

The premise of what it might look like if the Y2K bug had actually come to fruition is an interesting setup. And from the trailer, I think the simply titled Year 2000 could be described as a disaster comedy in the style of This is the end meets a slasher film. Nevertheless, the 90s vibes of the film are completely wrong, with everything from hairstyles to production design to Year 2000The teenage characters talk and interact with each other. It tries hard, but it just doesn’t convey the right 90s teen culture, and I know this because I was a teenager in the 90s myself.

Y2K feels like Generation Z actors trying to portray older Millennials

It is always a problem when young actors play characters that were created a decade before they were born

My first impression when watching the Year 2000 Trailer was that it seemed to be fun, but also that it felt like a bunch of Gen Z kids were trying their best to emulate the ’90s but failing. That’s the problem that always arises when actors who haven’t lived in a certain era try to imitate people from that era, even though the actual people of that era are still alive. Small details are off, making it feel less like an immersive experience in a specific decade and more like a cheap recreation. Granted, 2024 is (terrifyingly) 25 years removed from my then-19-year-old self and memories fade, but certain things in the trailer just aren’t accurate.

What strikes me most is the way a character screams into what I can only describe as a camcorder and says they are celebrating for the year 2000. So we just didn’t use cameras back then, instead it feels very much like Generation Z TikTok. Selfies and the modern way of speaking directly to the audience by recording yourself was simply not really in vogue at the time. If they had pulled out a disposable camera, that would have been perfect, but using a camcorder would have got you branded a snitch, especially at a house party. We used technology differently than today’s Generation Z, so this moment stands out as inauthentic. A younger generation tries to guess how we would have behaved and fails because they have no real frame of reference.

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Y2K review: Julian Dennison is the highlight of a chaotic sci-fi horror comedy that loses its charm

“Y2K” will certainly find an audience, but nostalgia and a solid premise are not enough to make the film a memorable experience.

The 90s details are too obvious and not right

“Tubthumping”? In 1999? Please.

The 90s details in the Year 2000 Trailers are not quite right. For example, we had all said goodbye to Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping”, which came out in 1997. Other songs were much 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 precise, The trailer should have used “Smooth” by Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana. It cannot be emphasized enough how much this song had a stranglehold on all of us in late 1999.

Likewise, the characters are too clean and too perfectly styled, even when they try to appear as if they are not. Our decade was the era in which grunge exploded, and 1999 was a year that saw a transition between the grime of the grunge era and the shiny, futuristic techno-pop of the early 2000s. Kids just didn’t look as sleek and neat back then. Hairstyles were different and more extreme, clothes more distinctive. If you want a good example of a teen house party movie that goes over the top but still accurately captures the mood of the era, then The 1998 is it. I can barely wait for it is a good choice:

There are many 90s references in the Year 2000 Trailer that introduces the concept of “show, don’t tell.” The film tells us – very obviously and explicitly – that this is a 90s film set in the 90s, with 90s material, and by the way, was it mentioned that it is set in the 90s? From the first seconds of the AOL dial-up screen, the trailer tries to convince us that this movie is set in the 1990s. The problem is, it doesn’t feel that way.

The Millennium Panic was real (but not for the reasons mentioned in the film)

In the end it was a lot of nothing

Looking back, it seems crazy that we were even worried about the Y2K bug, which will sound objectively crazy to anyone under 35. The worry was there, but we didn’t think it could be the end of the world – at least not most of us. After all, most of us who were teenagers didn’t really think the planet was going to be thrown into chaos – but we would not have accepted your bet if you had said that absolutely nothing would be disturbed.

Don’t get me wrong – there were definitely people who were panicking and convinced that anything 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 emergency equipment in hospitals failing and patients dying. But most of us, especially those of us in our teens and 20s, just thought that the most that could happen was that our computer programs were buggy. Still, we weren’t sure what was going to happen. and we definitely didn’t have a house party that night.

I can tell you what actually happened, though: nothing. Despite all the fuss about a potential disaster, the Y2K bug passed without a single hiccup, probably thanks to the computer engineers and IT people who had been working overtime for the past few months to avert any kind of downtime or software disaster. No computers became sentient and no machinery went completely dead. Maximum overdrive on us. And I would know if they had done it, because I was part of the Disney World ensemble on New Year’s Eve 1999.

I remember they gave us flashlights and whistles and sent us to the park at ten to midnight.just in case.” What a group of teenagers should do in the face of a potential global crisis, I don’t know. Maybe we could have whistled the Y2K bug to death. We left thinking we might have to calm down panicking parkgoers or get broken rides running again. Instead, my colleagues and I sat with our backs against a brick ledge, staring up at the sky, talking about how bored we were, although we did pause every now and then to give directions to a guest. The fact that machines would come to life and try to kill us was definitely not something to worry about.

It’s strange considering it comes from Kyle Mooney and Jonah Hill

You would think they would know better

The most astonishing thing about the discrepancy between Year 2000 Trailer is the SNL Alum Kyle Mooney is the writer and director, and Jonah Hill is the 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 rather than a fully fleshed out idea. The props feel like props; the costumes feel like costumes. Year 2000 has a 63% on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems about right. Hopefully the trailer is misleading, though, and the film feels a lot more authentically ’90s, because right now it feels like a movie that’s really, really trying to pretend it knows what Napster is and that it remembers Woodstock ’99, but fails.

Millennium (2024)

2.0

On the last night of 1999, two high school students crash a New Year’s Eve party and must fight for their lives via dial-up connection in this disaster comedy.

Release date

March 9, 2024

Authors

Evan Winter

Pour

Rachel Zegler, Alicia Silverstone, Julian Dennison, Jaeden Martell, Eduardo Franco, Mason Gooding, Miles Robbins, Tim Heidecker

Duration

93 minutes

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