Made up exclusively of archival footage, directors Brian Becker and Marley McDonald’s era defining pastiche Time Bomb Y2K finds a comfortable balance between history, nostalgia, and modern social commentary.
Those old enough to have lived through the last few years of the twentieth century will have no trouble recalling the hysteria surrounding a potential worldwide meltdown that would occur as the year 1999 turned over the odometer to the year 2000. Most computers – including many being used in vital systems and infrastructure – weren’t designed or programmed to accept “2000” as a valid year, meaning they would likely think it was the year 1900. During a time when computers and laptops were starting to become a common sight in most homes and just as the internet age was starting to hit its stride, such a resetting on a wide scale could prove to be catastrophic.
Becker and McDonald don’t include anything in the way of contemporary interviews for Time Bomb Y2K, but the figure that looms largest is that of computer expert Peter de Jager, who was outspoken in his belief that governments and corporations start fixing “the bug” sooner rather than later. Time Bomb Y2K largely covers this wide reaching technological phenomenon from 1996 up to 2000, but Becker and McDonald’s film subtextually showcases how some of the things that went down have had a lasting impact on politics, culture, and science.
Framing Y2K as a sort of climax for the human race, Becker and McDonald paste together a wonderful cultural snapshot, that also pays some long overdue respect to the various engineers and programmers who helped turn the tide away from any sort of disaster with time enough to spare. It makes one realize that people have largely gone back to taking the tenuous availability of technology for granted, even though cultures of preparedness, opportunism, and conspiracy theories have only gained steam.
The real question at the heart of Time Bomb Y2K is if the problem was the computers or the people using them. Becker and McDonald aren’t always playing things for jokes or being overly serious, instead presenting the truth that lies between those extremes. People are still getting used to such omnipresent levels of interconnectedness, and Time Bomb Y2K looks at the flashpoint where that shift in culture met up with social issues and technological imperfections in a huge way.
Saturday, April 29, 2023 – 8:15 pm – Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema
Wednesday, May 3, 2023 – 3:30 pm – TIFF Bell Lightbox 1
Saturday, May 6, 2023 – 1:00 pm – Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema
Time Bomb Y2K will air on HBO later this year.
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