Hugh Wilson’s barely pre-Millennium “fish out of time” romantic comedy film is a late Gen X shot in the arm, offering up a squeaky clean dose of 1960s wholesomeness in the face of the malaise that had characterized the previous decade and the anxiety around the upcoming turn of the Millennium. Released in 1999, the film plays on the disaffected youth ideal that characterized the 1990s as one of hopelessness and degraded value systems, the natural outcome of young adults disenfranchised by their parents’ embrace of the Me Generation attitudes of the 1980s. Alicia Silverstone’s character Eve, in a role remarkably similar to her breakout Clueless role 4 years prior, represents the modern world, centered in Southern California, which had regained its role as a stand in for modern values in the past decade. An antidote to this materialistic culture is offered in Brendan Fraser’s Adam character, a child of the 1960s who had lived his entire 35 years in a fallout shelter, an innocent flower unsullied by the perceived societal degradation that had befallen American culture in the ensuing time.

The 1990s were a time exploding with escapist romantic comedy films aimed at teenagers, just as time travel films, especially those highlighting the recent past, had remained popular for over a decade. Each offered different paths to escapist fantasies in an increasingly nihilistic society that nevertheless refused to give up the ghost that a better world was possible.

The film’s juxtaposition of the 1960s and the 1990s is countered by the era’s similar fears of “the end of the world as we know it” as popularized by R.E.M.’s Gen X anthem of the same name featured on the soundtrack. Whether the fear is of impending nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Communists or the more ephemeral fear of the possibility of societal collapse in a Y2K computer dependent world potentially unprogrammed to deal with a new Millennium, the film offers a commentary on different approaches to doomsday. Where Adam’s father, Calvin, approaches the fear of the bomb with uber preparedness and Eve and her friends approach the coming Y2K scare with an equally deliberate apathy, it is ultimately Adam’s awareness of the problems of the world and conscious choice to approach the Biblical “knowledge of good and evil” not with retreat or disengagement but with an unshakable optimism that wins the day, offering a ray of hope that would grow in subsequent years into a Millennial Generation in Adam’s own image – acquainted with challenges and concerned with making a difference.

-Jeremy Ebersole, @jeremytheebersole