Rachel Zegler’s new film addresses a real “apocalypse” of the millennium: Y2K explained
The title Y2K alone is enough to transport mature moviegoers back to a new (if not hysterical) time. Rachel Zegler’s latest film, however, will probably mean nothing to Generation Z.
Kyle Mooney’s new A24 film tackles a cultural milestone. The disaster comedy turns back the clock to a night that would change everything – or so some people thought.
Picture this: It’s New Year’s Eve 1999. You’re wearing a tube top and trying to enjoy the night. Your friend, a computer programmer, is sitting in the corner sweating. They say the apocalypse is coming! Your sober buddy is blithely eating his double nachos.
What the hell is going on here? Well, the new film gives young viewers a fun and harmless prank. We’ve broken down the original (without spoilers) so we can all enjoy it together.
What is the Y2K movie about?
Y2K is approximately Two high school students burst into a New Year’s Eve party in 1999. When disaster strikes, they have to fight for their lives.
The characters attend the party and joke that some people think the year 2000 will be the end of the world. Unfortunately for them, the technology breaks when the bells ring. And by broken, we mean Varsity Blues VHS tapes and wired landline phones trying to kill them.
It’s a typical teen film. There’s drinking, crushes and the world is about to end.
The true millennium explained
The Y2K bug was a programming error that some thought would cause catastrophic problems during the transition to the year 2000.
When complex computer programs were written in the 1960s-1980s, engineers used a two-digit code for the year, dropping the 19. For example, instead of “1970” it would be “70.” Dates were truncated because data storage was expensive and took up a lot of physical space.
Inventions often require ingenuity and quick creation without much thought about how things might be 50 years from now. Most consumers weren’t thinking about car emissions when automobiles became commonplace, and engineers didn’t plan for the year 2000 when programming computers.
Why people were worried
NBCMooney’s is by far not the first Y2K film.
As the year 2000 approached, programmers realized that computers might interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000. This became known as the “millennium bug.” This made December 31, 1999, a scary day. No one knew what would happen when the clocks moved to January 1, 2000.
Banks that recalculate their interest rates daily were a real problem. Instead of calculating the interest rate for one day, a computer could calculate the interest rate for minus almost 100 years, as National Geographic explains.
“Technology centers like power plants were also at risk from the Y2K bug. Power plants rely on routine computer maintenance to perform safety checks like water pressure or radiation levels. If the date is incorrect, it will skew those calculations and potentially put nearby residents at risk.”
And of course, in troubling times, there are those among us who tend to panic. There has been a media hype, and jokes about the end of the world have been made in schools and at dinner tables.
The consequences
Shaking hands opened the blinds in the morning and discovered… that the world was not burning (although in the Y2K movie it very much was).
When the year 2000 came, there were a few problems. But they were largely mitigated by software and hardware companies rushing to fix the bug and developing programs to help. Dates were extended to four digits on as many systems as possible.
Not everything went perfectly: At a Japanese energy plant in Ishikawa, some radiation devices failed. But backup systems ensured that there was no danger to people. The USA also registered rocket launches in Russia and attributed them to the error (this does make us sweat). In reality, the missile launches were part of the Russian conflict in the Chechen Republic.
“Countries like Italy, Russia and South Korea did little to prepare for the Y2K problem. They had no more technological problems than countries like the United States, which spent millions of dollars to combat the problem,” added National Geographic.
The legacy of the millennium is that of fake news, but the concerns were justified.
Generation Z may watch the film without knowing what really happened
Whether you were alive and able to think independently during the Y2K crisis or you’re just an internet historian, it’s your duty to let your younger movie-going friends know that the Y2K crisis was real… sort of.
A24The world hasn’t ended, but remember: We live in the age of TikTok. Every day there’s a new cycle of disinformation or reason to believe we’re heading for a real disaster.
Drama was much harder to find in 1999, so this was a moment! Knowing this context makes the sci-fi film much more entertaining, even if some of the 90s references may not be understandable to younger minds.
The Y2K movie will be released in theaters on December 6, 2024 (a missed opportunity for a midnight New Year’s Eve screening, but that’s out of our hands).
Next, see Zegler in the live-action Snow White. For even more scary stories, check out the best horror movies on Amazon Prime and the best horror movies on Disney Plus.
