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Kyle Mooney still vividly remembers New Year’s Eve 1999. At age 15 he was sitting on his couch with a friend watching MTV and waiting (hoping?) for the world to end. It didn’t happen. Looking back on the evening, the SNL alum smirks and then points out that it was like the “opposite of COVID-19. So many people thought it would be nothing and it turned out to be one of the worst things to happen.” Nonetheless, the memory of the infamous Y2K panic that led to nowhere—and that New York minute where folks were confident the end was nigh because of a “millennium bug” in our computers—stayed with the comedian.
Cut to 25 years later, and Mooney is finally getting the chance to set things right. His feature-length directorial debut, Y2K, is a sci-fi absurdist comedy that imagines an alternate reality where high school scrubs (Jaeden Martell and Julian Dennison) actually go out to their senior class’ mega New Year’s Eve Party. There Martell’s nebbish hero might finally kiss the girl of his dreams (Rachel Zegler). Or he would if all three, plus the rest of their town, weren’t about to discover it’s the end of the world as they know it.
As depicted in the movie, this Armageddon is both incredibly bloody and wickedly funny. And in the minds of the people who made it, the film provides a sort of gallows humor spectacle which each generation secretly wants to revel in.
Take for example Rachel Zegler. Born in 2001, the West Side Story and Hunger Games star hadn’t spent a lot of time worrying about the doomsday that never was. Growing up she associated the term “Y2K” with folks telling her “that’s a super Y2K outfit” or that they compiled a “Y2K playlist” that you need to hear.
“I feel it had mostly been used to describe a certain aesthetic for clothing, music, era of films, era of time,” Zegler explains. “It wasn’t something that my parents talked about. No one had really briefed me on it.” Yet when the script came along, she found herself diving to the strangest corners of the internet.
Says Zegler, “I had come across a survival video that was like a VHS tape that was processed and put onto YouTube, and it was just the most bizarre thing I had ever seen. And that sent me down a rabbit hole with the videos of Bill Clinton talking about what was going to happen.”
While Y2K was already a historical obscurity by the tail-end of the 2000s, its phenomenon was not. After all, Zegler, like all the twentysomething stars of Y2K, remembers the next supposed apocalypse we were supposedly doomed to live through: New Year’s Day 2012 when the Mayan calendar ended.
“I feel like that was our version of Y2K,” Zegler considers. “I was 11 when that took place, and I was on a camping trip with the Girl Scouts and everybody was crying. It was such a weird moment. But it [represents] one of those mass hysteria moments where an idea catches fire with everybody, and they start making up other stories about what they think is going to happen until that snowballs into something crazy. And then nothing happened. Just like Y2K.”
Hence the appeal of the movie Y2K which allows us to live, if vicariously, in an alternate history where the worst fears of the “millennium bug” come true—perhaps even more so as the movie features killer Roombas and iMacs.
“I think there is probably a species-wide collective death drive,” muses Evan Winter who co-wrote Y2K with Mooney. “It’s like a form of escapism and it’s something that you don’t want to live through in real life, so you [try to] get a fix on it in a story, and you can get the thrill of it, but then also the safety of it not being real.”
Along the way of watching the world according to Limp Bizkit burn, Winter and Mooney are likewise able to revisit the very real pop culture relics and glories of their youth—even if they noticeably center their film on teenagers who were a little older than themselves. All is par for the course of someone attempting to channel the early filmography of Julia Stiles or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And in the process, we note, the filmmakers are also placing themselves on the vanguard of pop culture nostalgia since Y2K is the first modern film to tap into the member berries of the late 1990s.
“I always feel like I’m at the vanguard,” Mooney smiles. He elaborates, “We definitely drew a lot from the movies of the era, and we definitely wanted the film to feel like a pretty classic coming of age teen movie, so certainly we were talking about and watching things like Can’t Hardly Wait, Ten Things I Hate About You, She’s All That, amongst a bunch of others.”
So, from a certain point-of-view, Y2K might just be the movie to teach Generation Z what it means to party like 1999.
Y2K is in theaters now.
The post Kyle Mooney Taught Rachel Zegler and the Cast of Y2K to Party Like It’s 1999 appeared first on Den of Geek.
