Weekend Watch - Y2K
Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is the late 90s, early 2000s nostalgia-fueled teen horror comedy from SNL alum Kyle Mooney and production studio A24, Y2K. The disaster movie about what could have happened if the machine apocalypse really was triggered by the turnover from 1999 to 2000 stars Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, Daniel Zolghadri, Lachlan Watson, Fred Durst, Kyle Mooney, Eduardo Franco, Mason Gooding, and The Kid Laroi. The film opened in theaters this weekend to middling reviews from both audiences and critics. Let’s get into it.
Letter Grade: D+; giving this film any rating higher than this would feel wrong, but it does some things really well, depending on your take on it.
Should you Watch This Film? Obviously not, right? Unless… there’s some moments in this film that are truly some of the funniest moments this year (often unintentionally). It’s not good, but it might be fun enough to warrant a watch.
Why?
Y2K on paper is a film full of clunky dialogue, odd skips in scenes, a marked lack of internal logic for its premise, and an aggressive amount of homages to the cringeyest parts of late 90s and early 2000s culture. If you’re watching it as a conventional high school horror comedy, you’re going to be frustrated with the seeming randomness of the way that story beats unfold – the story is the loosest skeleton, relying almost entirely on convenient plot points to move from scene to scene and moment to moment – and the horror never really hits beyond some moments of gore and some solid practical effects for a B-movie. However, by the end of the film, I was able to appreciate what the film was doing because it becomes readily apparent that the film and actors are in on the joke. No one in this film, by the time it made it to the big screen at least, seems to be seeking to make something “good”. Rather, the film feels like one big troll and/or parody of the 90s and 2000s nostalgia that has been seeing a resurgence in the last year or so. The first twenty minutes of film will hit like crack for people looking for those old references within a high school comedy, and it’s probably objectively the best part of the film; however, once things start spinning out of control, the film leans into the odder parts of 2000s culture – coding, niche rap, Limp Bizkit – and you start to realize that you can either lean into the jokes and laugh at the fact that people once lived like this or sit back and get mad that the film isn’t behaving at all like a typical high school, horror, or nostalgia film. On some level this is a smart film, but on all other levels, it’s incredibly dumb, but don’t let that stop you from seeing it, as it’s still one of the funniest new films I’ve watched this year. I don’t know that everyone should see this film, and I don’t know that it really was as intentionally constructed as I’m giving it credit for. What I do know is that my wife and I both laughed a lot while agreeing that it's a very dumb movie. Check it out in theaters if you want to, or don’t. It’s up to you.
