Time Bomb Y2K Plot Summary
Time Bomb Y2K is the newest addition to hit Max just in time for the New Year. It’s an 80-minute documentary that looks back on the crazy times from the mid-1990s to the year 2000 and the Y2K hysteria that worried many people in the world that life as we knew it was indeed going to end. The film never has any interviews in it to give us a retrospective look. But rather, it strings together archival footage throughout the years to create its narrative.
What is Y2K?
From around the mid-1990s up until the clock struck midnight for the year 2000, people around the world were worried about Y2K. It was a technological fear that computers would reset their internal clock from 1999 back to 1900 rather than the year 2000. Thus making their usage obsolete, or at least that’s what we feared.
Not just personal computers but any sort of CPU that kept life as we know it up and running. ATMs, the stock market, government information, and national security were all threatened by the idea of computers turning against us.
What was done to prevent it?
For many years leading up to Y2K, the IT industry and computer programmers worked night and day to tweak anything they could so that computers across the spectrum would not do what was feared in the years to come.
There is no real main character in the documentary. But there is a focus on a man who was at the forefront of preventing an event like this from happening. Peter de Jager was a computer engineer who foresaw the massive issue. He was kind of the hype man for this doomsday of sorts.
How does Y2K affect pop culture?
By the last few years of the 1990s, Y2K was more than just a problem that the government and the economy faced on a global scale. Artistically, we started to see a lot of films and music comment on the world’s issues. Films that ranged from The Matrix to End of Days all talked about the end times. Some in a biblical sense, others in a science fiction sense.
There’s a segment of musical acts commenting on what the effect of the new millennium has had on them. And like always, when there are talks of end times upon us, the evangelicals of the world have a lot to say.
What happens on New Year’s Day 2000?
Nothing, absolutely nothing. As New Year’s Eve wore on, we started to see the effects of what was happening in the time zones ahead of America, and everything seemed to be fine. So by the time the ball dropped, all was right in the world for a brief moment. But, as we know, that is always subject to change.
What is the message being conveyed in Time Bomb Y2K?
Documentaries like these that examine an excerpt of time in the history of the world always have a deep-rooted message. And it comes in the film’s final moments. We see what feels like an educational video starring kids from the early 2000s talking about all the good we can do in the world at the start of a new millennium.
And it ends with one kid saying, “Fix the world; don’t screw it up again,” and then the film cuts to black. Therefore, it leaves us in a subtle manner wondering if we screwed things up really badly over the last two decades.
Read More: Time Bomb Y2K Review