Y2K is a 2024 horror comedy film that is bafflingly foolish and absurd in its plot and narrative and really made me wonder how Rachel Zegler found herself here after starring in Spielberg’s West Side Story. Entirely centered around late ‘90s nostalgia and the real Y2K scare at the turn of the century, the film follows the tribulations of a teenager, Eli, as humanity faces the scare of becoming slaves to technology and robots, quite literally. Overall, Y2K might be a good watch if you are interested in weird and off-kilter presentations but can be easily avoided by regular audiences because of its paper-thin plot.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
Y2K begins with a close-up of a computer screen, with the programs being run making it very clear that it is the late 1990s. The user connects his computer to the internet using a dial-up network, watches a video of President Clinton speaking about how prepared America is ahead of Y2K, or the year 2000, using the RealPlayer software, and then opens up Instant Message. The names of this software, the long wait for the dial-up connection, and the overall theme of Windows 98 splashed all over the screen are enough to make any viewer who remembers the time quite nostalgic. Therefore, when we learn that the user is a teenager named Eli, there is an instant connection with him, which is quite intended by the film. Eli is a regular nerd with stunted social skills, and his only friend is another dork named Danny.
On the 31st of December, 1999, Eli leaves home to go over to Danny’s house for a sleepover, while his parents would be having their own party to celebrate the new year and, in fact, the new millenium. Fear of the Y2K bug is still doing the rounds, as many are scared that the dates on their computers would reset to 1900 instead of 2000, but the kids are quite sure that nothing of this sort is about to happen. Eli spends the day at Danny’s place playing video games and watching adult films, but his mind is somewhere else altogether. Eli has been very interested in a classmate of theirs, Laura, who happens to be extremely gifted with computers and coding, but he cannot muster up the courage to admit his liking.
As the two boys know of a party being held at a school senior’s house that night, they decide to crash the event and have fun of their own. But while Danny is quite social and therefore gets the attention of girls almost immediately, Eli is left all alone. He tries to talk to Laura, but is interrupted by her boyfriend, a bully known as Soccer Chris. During his solitary tour of the house, Eli stumbles upon two schoolmates getting intimate in one of the bedrooms, but this couple is soon about to experience something horrific. Before that, the clock strikes down to midnight, the year 2000 rolls in, and there are immediately some strange occurrences with regards to electronic devices. As lights flicker and the digits on the microwave’s display keep turning by their own, there is a loud shout from the upper floor.
The entire crowd rushes to the bedroom to find one of the schoolmates, whom Eli had stumbled upon earlier, lying dead on the floor with a piece of the fan’s blade stuck in his head. His shocked girlfriend claims that the bed jumped by itself and launched the teenager into the air, leading to him getting impaled by the fan blade. Although nobody believes her at first, the disbelief can last only for a few seconds, as a toy car seemingly driven by a small laptop arrives at the scene and kills another boy using a makeshift flamethrower. Thus, it becomes apparent that with the arrival of Y2K, computers have turned against humanity and are using every piece of technology possible to wage war against them.
How do feelings of loss drive the characters forward?
Despite its spoofy and abstract premise, and also the comical presentation, Y2K makes enough of an effort to make itself serious at times, particularly with respect to the experiences of the characters. After realizing that the computers have turned themselves into sentient robots, Eli and Danny plan on escaping the house, and they also take Laura with them. However, as Danny tries to get the gates opened, he is impaled by the sharp arm of one of the villainous robots, and the teenager dies on the spot. This death has an immense effect on the protagonist, and Eli is entirely driven in his decision to save the world because of Danny’s death.
When the kids eventually find out what the computers are trying to do and realize that their whole city has been taken over by the electronic beings, most want to remain at the safe shelter that they find. However, Eli decides to take control of the situation and try and help humanity in any way possible, choosing to go to the school building, which has been turned into a base by the computers, despite knowing that going there would be dangerous. Yet, Eli chooses to do so in order to honor the memory of his best friend and to ensure that Danny did not have to die in vain. Ultimately, it is something that Danny had given to Eli that helps him save the day, but more on that a bit later.
One of the teenagers who initially flees the house with Eli and Laura is Farkas, who is boastful about his skills with a skateboard. He tries to flaunt his moves as soon as he sees a pole, but immediately falls and dies by bleeding from his head. This death is also quite comical, but it has a strong impact on another character, Ash, who had been a part of Farkas’ group of bullies. Although it becomes gradually clear that Ash was also bullied by the gang, and she had become a part of the group in order to avoid being targeted, she still grieves the loss of Farkas and misses him greatly.
It is mainly from her sense of loss that she bonds with another survivor, CJ, who himself is disturbed by the immense violence and loss of lives that the group witnesses. CJ is a rapper and a musician with his own band, and he really dislikes the works of Limp Bizkit. However, when the band’s frontman, Fred Durst, shows up and tries to help the group fight against the machines, CJ steps in and helps the musician despite not agreeing with his work. Therefore, at moments, Y2K makes it clear that humans need to work together and leave their differences aside in order to survive the dangers posed by the violent technology. But characters realize this only after they witness the deaths of their close ones, as most humans act very differently before the attack, and their differences make them easier targets for the sentient computers that try to make the humans their slaves.
Why do the computers attack in the film?
The attack of the computers is initially quite confusing, as they simply turn every electronic object against human beings and have them attack people without any apparent reason. One of the first characteristics noticed about computers is that they keep adding more and more electronic devices into the robotic bodies being created, as they almost take the form of kaijus, in the sense that the robots are made up of various small electronic objects cobbled together. Kitchen appliances like microwaves and dishwashers work in unison to kill humans, while toys like the Tamagotchi chase and kill others at the party. The intention of the robots is initially to kill humans, while it later changes to inserting a certain chip in the head of every human and turning them into literal slaves of technology.
The whole plan becomes clear for the first time when Eli’s own computer, which has turned into a robot, is captured by the teenagers, and a video intended for other computers is watched on it. The computers had been preparing for Y2K, which they referred to as the Singularity, which was when they would become sentient and essentially come alive. Once turned into sentient beings, the computers were ordered to grab hold of any electronic devices they come across and take the shape of humanoid robots to then target humans and forcefully insert assimilation chips into their heads. The idea was to harness the power of imagination and the general thinking ability of human brains into processing power for the computers and take control of the entire world with this power.
In this particular town, the computers have turned the high school into their assimilation center, where humans are rounded up and taken to for the assimilation procedure. Like the name of the event, Singularity, suggests, every computer is controlled by one single consciousness after Y2K, and this makes it all the more difficult for the teenagers to fight back. Once they reach the school, they notice that humans, including their own parents, are simply giving up and accepting computers as their new masters. Therefore, men and women line up and have the robots insert chips into their heads, which essentially turns them into minions controlled by the computer consciousness. Their own consciousness travels to some utopian and imaginary world, where there is no worry of any kind, and the human spirits rather enjoy their time there, while their bodies are controlled by the computer. It can be guessed that the computers plan on using these enslaved humans to further turn other humans into slaves, as their intention is to take over the entire world and use their former masters to achieve it.
Did Eli and Laura defeat the robots?
When Laura realizes that one single consciousness is running all the robots after Y2K, she figures out a way to possibly defeat them—by planting a virus in the main consciousness program. She uses the captured robot, which was once Eli’s personal computer, to create this virus, or kill code, which would shut down the entire consciousness, and transfers it onto a hard drive. This hard drive, mysteriously, is not found and assimilated by any of the robots that attack them before and after, and this just seems to be a minor flaw in the plot that Y2K chooses to look over.
In Y2K’s ending, Eli and Laura have to insert this drive into the main computer’s slot, inside their school building, but find it to be a very difficult task as the sentient computer keeps electrocuting them. This is when Eli suddenly remembers the last gift that his best friend, Danny, had given him, as the latter had felt that his friend might need it at the party. The gift happens to be a condom, and Eli immediately uses it to wrap Laura’s hand to protect her from getting electrocuted by the computer. Thus, she plugs the hard drive into the computer’s slot and runs the kill code, which quickly shuts down the main program running the consciousness. In the end, Eli and Laura successfully defeat the evil robots and save the world and humanity.
What does the last scene in the film suggest?
Although Eli and Laura save the world, Y2K does not end with the triumph but shows us a scene from 5 years later. Eli and Laura are now graduating college, and they visit Danny’s grave to pay their respects to him. Eli intends to pursue education while running his own music blog. Laura has continued to excel in the field of coding and is currently working as a software developer for Durst Industries, the leading corporation in the area. As the name suggests, this company has been founded by the musician Fred Durst, whose heroics on Y2K day made him so popular among the people that he turned into a tech entrepreneur and then also got voted into the Senate.
Ash, who had also survived the night, drives Eli and Laura to the graveyard, and as they all leave, she turns on the music on a small portable music player that clearly resembles the iPod. As she connects the device to her car’s speakers and plays music, there is a visible glitch on the device’s screen, and the face of the computer consciousness appears on it. As it laughs out loud, Y2K makes it clear that the evil consciousness has not been completely defeated after all, and it is still preparing to launch another attack against humans. Perhaps the laugh at the end suggests that it is almost ready to attack, and its second attempt at ruling over the world will take place very soon.
The most crucial question that this second attack will pose, irrespective of whether we get to watch the events unfold in a sequel to Y2K, is with regards to how prepared humans would be for such a disruption. On the surface, humans should really be ready to fight back and stop computers from taking over, after having survived such an event once, and also with Fred Durst turning into a tech entrepreneur and Laura, who had literally defeated the robots once, working for him. However, v does present humans as a mostly foolish and selfish species who can be easy targets if some other species wants to exploit them. Furthermore, the scene from 2005 also makes it evident that humans have only grown more reliant on technology, and these two factors combined can suggest that the next fight against sentient robots might not be so easy.
