PICTURE IT: the United States, fall of 1999. The Twin Towers were still standing, gas was an astonishingly low $1.25 a gallon, and Donald Trump was still just a rich asshole who did Pizza Hut commercials. We were ready to leave the rather unsavory 90s behind, and step into a bright new future, where surely we would finally get the flying cars and robot maids long promised to us.
However, a shadow loomed on the horizon. It was a computer glitch, but the kind of glitch that had the power to knock everything from banking systems to power grids to even nuclear reactors offline, rendering them useless. Its name was Y2K1.
Said glitch was so simple in explanation that it almost seemed like a joke: computer systems weren’t programmed to recognize 00 as a year, and thus would be unable to distinguish between 2000 and 1900. Because such a situation was unprecedented, no one was quite sure what would happen once the clock ticked past midnight on January 1st. The best-case scenario would have been nothing. The worst-case scenario would have been a Maximum Overdrive situation, plunging society into darkness and putting us at the mercy of our computer overlords. Once that happened, it could take days, months, or never to get things back online, and we’d eventually have to rely on clamshells and acorns as currency.
Even pre-social media, no small amount of opportunistic grifters capitalized on this fear of the unknown as a money-making venture, selling gullible people doomsday prep kits or Y2K computer spray, compressed air that was presumably supposed to just blast that pesky bug right out of it. Good Christian Jerry Falwell seized the opportunity to once again peddle the same end-of-the-world bullshit that bought him a new Cadillac every year for forty years straight.
Mainstream media produced their fair share of hysteria porn related to Y2K as well, though, taking a plausible deniability approach by framing it as “well, it’ll probably be alright, but let’s suppose just for a moment that maybe it won’t be?” This resulted in the extremely earnest Y2K Family Survival Guide, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, who opens the whole thing by rattling off a list of nightmare situations that “may” (turn how many times someone uses the word “may” into a drinking game and your liver will explode) occur. Credit cards may no longer work. Hospitals may not be able to provide medical care. Food and water delivery may be halted. We may have to eat our children.
Or, we may not. We just don’t know.
The thing was, we did know. Or at least, some of us did. By the way it was reported you’d think that Y2K was a problem that had only just come up in the prior year or two, and that there was little that could be done to mitigate potential damage except hope for the best. In fact, computer scientists had been aware of the threat of Y2K since the 80s, and by the time the public heard about it, numerous fixes and fail-safes had already been put into place. The worst it got in the U.S. was a few slot machines in Delaware breaking down. No power mainframes collapsed, no children were eaten.
But of course, nothing happening is boring. Perfectly timed with the brief late 90s resurgence of disaster films, NBC aired Y2K: the Movie2, which depicted every possible worst-case scenario in glorious technicolor. Concerned that it would send viewers into a War of the Worlds-like panic, banking and utility company representatives requested that the network not run the movie, and NBC compromised by tacking on a “we have no proof any of this will happen” disclaimer at the beginning.
Thank goodness for that, because here the Y2K bug is practically a sentient being, moving across the globe and leaving a path of death and destruction in its wake. Ken Olin, brow permanently furrowed in an expression of grave concern, is Nick Cromwell, a systems analyst and evidently the only Y2K expert in the entire country. It’s less than two hours before midnight on December 31st, and Nick and his (curiously small) team, despite their best efforts, are bracing themselves for disaster, watching helplessly from time zone to time zone as a military plane just drops out of the sky over the Marshall Islands, all of Europe goes dark, and a Scandinavian nuclear power plant melts down, instantly killing the entire crew.
The high-tech version of Jason Voorhees eventually makes its way to New York City, where a foreboding bell rings over a shot of the New Year’s Eve ball dropping in Times Square, like the opening of AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells.” As soon as the power goes out, mass hysteria ensues, with people immediately attacking each other as if they’ve contracted a zombie virus instead of a situation that real-life New Yorkers had faced before in 1977, and would again in 2003. Y2K: the Movie is not just pessimistic in its portrayal of the effects of Y2K, but how people would react to them, like dumb, helpless animals. Even a doctor recklessly performs surgery on a pregnant woman, unable to make a decision without the help of a fetal monitor.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Nick’s wife, Alix (Kate Vernon), works in a hospital, while his bratty teenage daughter Kelly, who early on in the movie announces that she’s “sick of Y2K,” runs off to party with her “hacker friends” Kaos and Klipper. Now, you’d think, given it’s important to mention that they’re “hackers,” that Kaos and Klipper would somehow end up saving the day. But no, they serve no purpose whatsoever, and disappear by the third act, after they succumb to the rage disease Y2K inexplicably causes and carjack someone, abandoning Kelly in the middle of all the mayhem. This whole subplot seems to exist mostly to punish Kelly for both disobeying her parents, and doubting that Y2K would bring on the apocalypse.
When it looks like a Tacoma nuclear power plant might meet the same fate as the one in Scandinavia, Nick saves the entire Pacific Northwest through the most analog of solutions: dumping cold water on everything. That’s the only thing that gets fixed, however, as, by the time the movie ends, the power is still out everywhere, planes are still grounded, and Y2K hasn’t been contained. If anything, it feels like the set-up to a TV series in which Nick travels all over the country trying to fix the damage Y2K has caused, turning the power back on in Los Angeles, getting Wall Street up and running again, and restarting a bunch of slot machines in Delaware.
Y2K: the Movie only works if you buy that not a single industry, energy provider, or business is prepared for the possibility of a mass power outage. The concept of a “manual override” seems to be non-existent. It goes unexplained why, for instance, a hospital generator, which is designed to function in just these kinds of situations, would fail, or why the locks on prison cell doors would be affected by a computer code glitch. I’m not sure the movie’s writers knew, and they definitely didn’t think their viewers would know. The sense of “we can tell these hapless boobs whatever we want and they’ll believe it” permeates the whole thing, which explains why they make such bush league goofs as claiming the new millennium starts on January 1st, 2000 (not until 2001), and showing a group of strangers in a bar watching the Tacoma power plant drama unfold on television, even though there’s no electricity.
With all the beats of a disaster movie in place, even someone running in slow motion from an explosion, Y2K: the Movie is reminiscent of the most hilarious moments in Airplane!, except played completely straight. If someone were to walk in on Ken Olin and say “I just want to say good luck, we’re all counting on you,” it wouldn’t be at all surprising. It’s one part horror movie, and one part cautionary tale, similar to The Net four years later, about the downside of being too reliant on computers. This is a lesson we’ve clearly taken to heart, as we now depend almost entirely on a single device small enough to lose in a toilet to do all of our communicating, banking, and traveling. Auld lang syne, everyone!
It was also occasionally referred to as the “millennium bug,” which sounds like a friendly mascot, maybe a cricket or a beetle wearing souvenir 2000 glasses.
Countdown to Chaos overseas, which is a much better title if you ask me.