The trailer showed the more overtly comic element of the premise, but having come from a studio with as much prestige as A24 I expected some deeper thematic material, maybe something nuanced about how we all surrendered so much of our privacy and time so willingly in the early digital era. But no, it was just a slightly silly and occasionally amusing comedy with very little below the surface, tonally similar to Hot Tub Time Machine but not nearly as funny.

The postage stamp premise is simple – when the clock turns over at midnight on New Year's Eve 1999, the machines don't break down thanks to the Y2K bug, they achieve destructive Skynet-style sentience, enacting enact a program to eradicate the human race.

And it's up to a ragtag group of teenagers in a small suburban American town to stop them, all of them collected at a New Year's Eve party when things go south.

There's lovable hero Eli (Jaeden Martell), who wants nothing more than to win the heart of classmate Laura (Rachel Ziegler, before she torpedoed Snow White with her social media presence and made herself one of the most hated celebrities online, quite ironic considering the premise here). He's accompanied by best friend Danny (Julian Dennison), a classic comic sidekick who's constantly trying to encourage Eli to make a move.

When the digital shit hits the fan, they team up with some of the kids who've bullied them relentlessly, another couple who fancy themselves Eminem-style wiggers and the eternally cheerful pothead hippie who runs the video store.

And that's the first problem – maybe it's a comment on the kinds of characters this style of movie had back in the era depicted, but they're all teen comedy archetypes we've seen a million times.

Anyway, the Y2K virus causes computers to turn any number of electronic tools on their masters, and the party is a bloodbath, Eli, Laura and the gang only just getting out in time. Even worse, the computers (in this New Year's Eve party at least) have collected together a series of spare parts and created a sentient robot that chases them like a mini transformer, armed with blades and torches.

They resolve to find their way to an underground bunker run by the video store hippie's stoner friends and wait it out, but something (I can't remember what, having almost lost interest by that time for want of an interesting plot or at least some actual comedy) convinces them they have the means to end the digital apocalypse by infiltrating the school where the computers are rounding people up in order to brainwash them to stay in line.

It's not very funny and at times quite uninteresting overall, but there are a couple of bright spots. The PSAs and videos the sentient computers produce to instruct the human race about exactly how and why they'll be bought to heel are very funny, and it gets the trappings of the technological culture (from the cultural touchstones of instant chat to the whine/whistle of a dial-up modem) exactly right.

It might be some sort of meta comment on the kind of movie in this genre that was actually made back in the Y2K era, but if you were around back then you've already seen it countless times. Maybe that's the secret I missed – it was targeting the digital native generation for whom Windows 95 and endless webpage pop ups are as quaint as black and white TV or crystal set radios are for Gen Xers like me.