Fellow Millennials: Where were you, on the night that the impending Y2K disaster descended upon us all? I was a 13-year-old junior high student, hanging at a (no doubt parentally supervised) house party with my ilk, with a distinct memory of discussing such topics as “Hey, is the world going to, you know, end at midnight?” The impending change in computer software as we breached the year 2000 was a topic that some had theorized might lead to global catastrophe of computer systems, but at the end of the day the Y2K scare resolved as nothing more than a whimper, a moment of collective panic that turned out to be unwarranted. But ah, what if things had gone quite differently? That little prompt forms the basis for the directorial debut of SNL‘s Kyle Mooney, in the form of A24 satirical horror comedy aptly titled simply Y2K. The film released its latest smile-inducing trailer today, remixing a real address from President Bill Clinton.
Y2K stars Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison, Rachel Zegler, Daniel Zolghadri, Lachlan Watson and Eduardo Franco as its primary crew of high school-aged warm bodies on the last night of 1999, only to find that when the clock strikes midnight, technology doesn’t only fail but rebel against its masters. This gives the film a parodic lean that captures both the ’90s house party aesthetic seen in the likes of Can’t Hardly Wait, and the “man vs. all machines” goofiness of Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, with a comedic dash of Tetsuo: The Iron Man for good measure. The younger cast members are joined by appearances from the likes of Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Mason Gooding, Fred Durst and Mooney himself, rounding out the cast.
As for the trailer, it looks quite charmingly silly to see all the analog technology of the era bolting itself together to form instruments of our destruction. Perhaps there will be a scene where someone wields a Skip-It as a deadly flail? It’s certainly a gas to see such a unabashedly dumb premise attached to the prestige sheen that the A24 name gives to a project–compared to something like this year’s I Saw the TV Glow, the tonal difference could hardly stand out more starkly. The film hits theaters on Dec. 6, 2024–in the meantime, check out the trailer below.