Time Bomb Y2K

Splicing archival footage in with a contemporary retrospective, but that isn't what this is. Th list documentary is entirely from archival footage with the most prominent voiceover being Leonard Nimoy, who has died over 5 years ago.

There's about 5 minutes dedicated to explaining what Y2K was and it's potential impact and the rest of it is just padding. You could swap half the runtime with an episode of doomsday preppers and the only noticable change would be video and audio quality.

This could have been something great some modern commentary about lessons learned, shortsighted management, other potential ICT disasters or even parallels to global warming but as it stands, it's merely an 80 minute timesink.

I lived through this, and, other than some software patches that were needed, it was much ado about something that could be fixed easily enough. They are showing the fringes of people that let themselves be swayed by doomsday messages. Most people that I knew at the time weren't too concerned. They knew nothing catastrophic would happen and they knew the software patches were being handled. Y2K was akin to the Mayan Calendar scare of 2012. You either believed it and waited for the end or you went on with your life as usual because you knew it was the media overblown fear mongering pushing the doom and gloom. It isn't very accurate, but it's not entirely wrong.

This is the second 'documentary' I have seen in the last few weeks where the filmmaker just strings along a bunch of clips about the subject.

Rather than explaining the Y2K issue with some sort of narration and context both at the time and looking back some 24 years later, the documentary relies on the clips from the times in order to do so.

All they did was compile news clips, movie clips and anything else from the late 90's that had anything to do with Y2K, present them in chronological order, and then add a few graphics here in there. Lazy and boring. I'm surprised HBO didn't just bury this.

A nice time capsule to show what it was like at the turn of the millennium. A good demonstration of how crazy people can get, but also how people can come together and solve a massive problem, by listening to the people who know what they are talking about and not the people in the fringes. Seems more important now than ever.

The documentary is just made from archive footage and doesn't really talk about the bug itself that much. But does show the world of 20 odd years ago and paints a picture of the optimism and panic that surrounded the turn of the millennium.

Gave a nice nostalgic watch to a time that seems like yesterday in my brain.

I feel slightly more confidant that I can relate this time to my daughter (who is older than I was at that time), and speak of more minute details. The good aspects of people uniting and a pre-9/11 world being so happy even when scared brings a little more joy than I had before watching this. It's incredible to see some of the foreshadowing of the world during this, and I am glad that the makers of this didn't focus on those. They let them be little cameos. In fact, I would have truly loved to see an ending where they showed the twin towers still erect. No words said about one year, nine months, and ten days from that moment. Just a silhouette. A reminder that worry is just imagination used incorrectly.

Not a bold statement from a person typing to many other people out there that may happen upon my review, but I was there. I was a ripe sixteen when the ball dropped, and I was very much up to zero good. However, this movie does a great job of going a few years before that very not fateful day. I was old enough to be aware, but young enough to not exactly know who Jager or Kostinen were. I probably saw their faces dozens or hundreds of times, but they didn't ring any bells while watching this film. All that said, bringing back up slight moments of my teenaged memory helped remind me of the fuss that this was.

6.8 stars is accurate.