Time Bomb Y2K is a new documentary streaming on Max that consists wholly of archival footage, so prepare yourself for an avalanche of 4:3 aspect ratios, Bill Clinton clips and hilarious references to the “information superhighway.” And as you’d likely expect, the film stirs up equal parts bemusement about a very weird part of world history and surprise at some of the socio-political balls the non-event got rolling. Those of a certain vintage who watch this film are sure to reflect upon the moment and say they were never worried in the first place, or that it didn’t really hurt to stockpile a decade’s worth of bullets and canned beans because hey you never know – or maybe that they might feel a little silly about the bullets and beans.
The Gist: Check out these people: Survivalists, making their own weapons, stretching and drying animal pelts, learning to make a fire with a wooden bow and, of course, not wearing shoes. They were part of a contingent who thought the world was going to end when the clock struck midnight on Jan. 1, 2000. That was theoretically when computers worldwide, all programmed to function on a system that only took into account two-digit years on any data featuring calendar dates, would fail, causing blackouts and plane crashes and financial collapse and probably even nuclear weapons to launch. Terrifying stuff! Almost as terrifying as this entire movie being constructed of old VHS footage!
Now, a graphic which, 25 years ago, looked like the future, but now looks goofily retro – that’s the way these things inevitably go, you know. It reads: 1996. Cue footage of President Clinton and veep Al Gore, running cables in a school for a photo op promoting how “six million feet” of computer wiring will soon bring The Internet to everyone everywhere, almost, and by “almost” I mean, most of those “everyones” everywhere were probably Caucasian. The Pres even says the information superhighway will “reduce the need for military confrontation” and bring people together. Another guy points out how the internet is the great equalizer, allowing fringe ideas on the same platform as mainstream ideologies, which he insists is awesome. OPTIMISM REIGNS.
By Retro Graphic 1997, however, all this interconnectedness pointed toward major trouble. Nerds worldwide began warning us that the aforementioned coding flaw, a product of shortsighted cost-cutting (aren’t all potentially mega-fatal things a result of people being greedy cheapskates?) could result in the mass failure of key elements of societal infrastructure. The king of the nerds was Peter de Jager, who was a well-informed voice of reason – the problem could be fixed, he said, but it would require a lot of work and cost a lot of money. This was back when experts like him were actually listened to, so by Retro Graphic 1998, Clinton and Gore put a smart guy named John Koskinen, the “Y2K czar,” in charge of the project, which is here analogized as “finding and replacing every bolt in every bridge in the world” in 21 months. A daunting task, but not impossible.
So as coders got to work with the digital equivalent of fine-toothed combs, the rest of the world kinda lost its shit. Doomsdayers began stockpiling goods, or selling their belongings and cashing out their savings to buy farms, or joining paranoid conspiratorial militias convinced that the government would use the opportunity to take what it wants from the citizenry, or using the opportunity to preach the return of Jesus H. Christ to the Earth. Scarier still, when doomsdayers can’t find likeminded people in their own communities, they find them on the internet. Naysayers called the Y2K conundrum a hoax and blamed the bubbling hysteria on conspiratorial nerds and capitalists looking to profit. Moderates sat back and hoped for the best, but probably didn’t buy a pallet of bottled water to stash in the basement. Somewhere in here, I’m pretty sure there’s a metaphor emerging here, but I can’t quite put my finger on it – maybe it has something to do with gross political divisiveness in the year 2023 and the increased splintering of society into cultlike factions? Yeah, that’s probably it.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Time Bomb Y2K’s is esseintially Werner Herzog’s the-internet-will-eventually-kill-us-all documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World crossed with remember-the-’90s VHS-heavy somebody-adjust-the-tracking-please docs like Beanie Mania or kid 90.
Performance Worth Watching: It’s refreshing to see guys like de Jager and Koskinen be very boring and straightforward in delivering necessary information to the public, and never feeling pressured to deliver soundbites.
Memorable Dialogue: Gotta love the slogan emblazoned on one computer programmer’s ballcap: “01/01/Oh! Oh!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Boy, don’t we all feel silly about that Y2K business now? Yeah, a little, maybe, but Time Bomb Y2K brings some retroactive clarity to the craziness by underscoring how the collective effort of governments, businesses and experts averted disaster with a lot of diligent work. This happened during somewhat happier times, when such collective action didn’t seem nearly as impossible as it did during, say, the Covid pandemic. Speaking of which, de Jager is the equivalent of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the Y2K scenario, a guy preaching calm, scientific reasoning in the face of a global phenomenon – and he wasn’t really a divisive figure, and that’s why I used the phrase “somewhat happier times” above. (Not that de Jager wasn’t a bit controversial, considering how he never really addressed the ethics of his selling Y2K doomsday merch on his website, in what sure looks to me like both an undermining of his serious message and a blatant conflict of interest.)
You won’t be surprised to see the seeds of social discord being sown here, either, via scads of TV-news clips – the media, of course, latched onto the Y2K phenomenon like a starved wolf to a fat rabbit – and, most amusingly, conspiracy-theory videocassettes, which is how weirdos circulated their fringe beliefs at the time. And here we see the heavily bearded head of a militia saying how significant distrust of the federal government prompted his group to do “our own investigation… so you can make up your own minds,” which is the 1998 equivalent of “doing your own research” on, say, vaccines, on YouTube and Facebook. De Jager even took to the airwaves to push back at “far right” conspiracy theorists who tried to fight his assertions.
And so we can draw plenty of straight lines to our current socio-political conundrums, and shake our heads sadly. We also can laugh at clips of Busta Rhymes and the Backstreet Boys espousing hot takes on Y2K on MTV, or Matt Damon voicing his opinion on the topic during a Talented Mr. Ripley junket. I mean, what retro-style doc worth its weight in Furby turds doesn’t deploy nuclear-strength nostalgia? That clip from a Leonard Nimoy PSA? Footage of Rudy Giuliani being significantly less than a complete maniac? Kenny G playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve to celebrate the year 2000? This stuff is gold, Jerry, gold! And it makes Time Bomb Y2K a little less weighty as it tackles a topic with some serious repercussions. Like some of the best things out there, the doc is fun and educational.
Our Call: There are times when Time Bomb Y2K feels a little gimmicky, but more often than not, it shows us what viewing the world through the lens of the media was like, pre-9/11. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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