SUNDAY 4 AUGUST 2019APOCALYPSE WOW
Impending doom, economic prosperity, blossoming online fandoms: Al
Horner explores the climate which led to 1999 being, quite possibly,
the best year in cinematic history
Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Reese Witherspoon in Election, Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and Tom Cruise in Magnolia (20th Century
Fox/Paramount Pictures/Rex)
How did America deal with the impending end of the world? It went to the movies, of course. In 1999, the
world was braced for chaos. The year 2000 was around the corner, and with it, the threat of disaster. Planes
were predicted to fall out of the sky and banking systems speculated to implode when the clock struck
midnight on the first day of the new millennium. When computer programs were first written in the 1960s,
engineers had used a two-digit code for the year, leaving out the “19”. Experts worried that programs would
not interpret the “00” correctly, causing catastrophic glitches and turning our electronics against us. The