Kyle Mooney’s new movie Y2K, in theaters Friday, is a horror-comedy depicting the worst case scenario of the Y2K bug just after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000.
Though computers were expected to have issues when dates changed from the year ’99 to ’00, Mooney said he was not worried in 1999.
“I thought that it would just make life inconvenient for a moment, like you couldn’t go to the convenience store for a day,” Mooney, 40, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
Many organizations worked in the late ’90s to update computer systems for compatibility in the new millennium. The U.S. military and private software companies were among those doing so in the United States.
Mooney said the panic over the year 2000 overshadowed the work that was done to avert a crisis. His movie has fun suggesting that because no safeguards were in place, machines could have come to life and murdered people.
“If they hadn’t done [preparation], would there have been some serious stuff?” Mooney asked. “But it seemed like people were pretty well-prepared to fight whatever was going to possibly go down.”:
Still, Mooney said, his mother did not take any chances.
“My mom was definitely fearful,” Mooney recalled. “She bought a bunch of jugs of water and some granola bars and stuff like that.”
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Y2K stars Jaeden Martell and Julian Dennison as Eli and Danny, respectively. The two high schoolers go to a New Year’s Eve party at which the machines come to life and kill partygoers.
Martell, 21, came to Y2K with horror experience, facing Stephen King’s terrors in It, as well as The Lodge and Arcadian. Martell said he tried to be tough making It at 13 and proving he was not scared, but has since let his guard down.
“Now, I allow myself to cry when I watch movies or be scared when I’m scared,” Martell said.
However, he said, the murdering machines in Y2K did not scare him.
“They sort of had this cute quality to them that almost makes you feel bad for them,” Martell said. “You’re like, ‘You know what? Humans suck. Take us out.'”
Dennison, 22, said the adventure of running away from killer machines highlights Danny and Eli’s coming of age.
“I think there’s something special about the pureness of seeing the world through a kid or a teenager’s eyes,” Dennison said. “They’re experiencing new things, they’re in high school and they’re trying to get through it.”
Beginning on Dec. 31, 1999, the film shows the boys playing N64 together and chatting with classmates on America Online. Aside from those period-specific details, Dennison said the friendship between Danny and Eli is timeless.
“I feel like everyone grows up having a best friend and someone that you can talk to without actually talking to them,” Dennison said. “You can just look at them from across a room and you know what they’re saying.”
Danny and Eli stick together when the jocks of their school pick on them. Martell said like “the greasers or the squares” in the ’50s and ’60s, every generation has social circles, and not everyone feels included.
“There’s outcasts in every generation,” Martell said. “There’s always going to be someone who fits into something. There’s always going to be someone who’s just outside of that and feels like they don’t have this identity.”
Once the machines come to life, all the teenagers have to band together for the common goal of surviving and defeating the computers. One victim doesn’t make it when a blender attacks.
Danny and Eli walk into the kitchen to find the blender already grinding away at the victim’s crotch. Mooney explained that the blender had leapt toward the crotch on its own.
“It’s still actually plugged in, but it has enough reach that it was able to kind of hop and then eventually get to his crotch,” Mooney said.
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