http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,32578,00.html

A True Y2K Disaster: the Movie by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)

3:00 a.m. 20.Nov.1999 PST Terrifying the public can be a dodgy undertaking nowadays, and in fin de siecle America it's not hard to see why. After a formulaic procession of quotidian disaster flicks such as Asteroid, Deep Impact, and Volcano, audiences seem to be rendered catatonic by catastrophe.

NBC's Y2K, airing Sunday at 9 p.m., falls just as flat.

Technical glitches and Y2K woes are an unconvincing pretext for what turns out to be a rather pedestrian action movie, in which our Hero Designate (Thirtysomething's Ken Olin as Nick Cromwell) must pull the plug on a Seattle nuclear power plant before it vomits radioactive detritus over much of North America. Bonus incentive: His daughter and wife are downwind.

Sound familiar? It should. Anyone who's suffered through similar brink-of-the-apocalypse flicks knows what happens next. (It's no coincidence that the movie's executive producer is David Israel, creator of the even more banal viral-terror miniseries Pandora's Clock.)

In fact, the most interesting thing about Y2K might be the buzz. Can fictitious depictions of a jet screaming toward the Potomac River, blackouts spreading from Virginia to Canada, and cash machines not doing what they're told panic Americans?

-- Declan (declan@y2kculture.com), November 20, 1999

Answers

Declan,

"fin de siecle" and "quotidian" in the same paragraph? You certainly outdid yourself here...

-- Nabi (nabi7@yahoo.com), November 20, 1999.

A rational explanation for making Y2K preparations

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001R UO

Sincerely,
Stan Faryna

Got 14 days of preps? If not, get started now. Click here.

Click here and check out the TB2000 preparation forum.

-- Stan Faryna (faryna@groupmail.com), November 20, 1999.

I expect this movie will impact people's behavior. It will affect the people who identify themselves as "GI". The "GI's" who turn it off during the first part will become even more doomier. They will now have further proof how bad things will be, because after all they saw it on the tv so therefore it must be true. The "GI's" who stick through the whole movie will now become pollies because they will entertain the notion that some whiny handsome useless looking guy will be able to solve the y2k problem in a matter of hours or days, because after all they saw it on the tv so it must be true. These new pollies will shunned by the true pollies, but the new pollies will probably not even notice. The same is true for the new hyper-doomers.

-- Mr. Nugget (catsbutt@umailme.com), November 20, 1999.

As someone else on this forum astutely pointed out the other day...

When was the last time you saw any reviews, good or bad, of a made- for-TV movie before it aired (or after it aired for that matter)?

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), November 20, 1999.

I expect the movie will impact people's behavior -- toward non-preparation. It will "numb-out" any thoughts DGI's might have had about possible Y2k problems.

-- Dean -- from (almost) Duh Moyn (dtmiller@midiowa.net), November 20, 1999.

McCullagh,

What did you think of the scene where Senator Dodd fell from the sky? I thought it was very scary!

-- (RUOK@yesiam.com), November 20, 1999.

Article in today's Vero Beach Press Journal about the worry about the movie's impact...

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), November 20, 1999.

OK, so the movie probably stinks. I still think it will effect some dgi's toward some last minute prep's. Many dgi's can't imagine how a little computer bug could effect their lives, after the movie their imagination will have plenty to feed on.

-- jamie (jdavis@recruitmax.com), November 20, 1999.

This movie is not going to change much. DGI's are DGI's for a reason: THEY DON'T GET IT!!! They WON'T get it. They can't get it. It's psychologically impossible for them to get it in the amount of time we have left. Liz Never squat with your spurs on.

-- Liz Pavek (lizpavek@hotmail.com), November 20, 1999.