We see that Clarke made some highly accurate predictions back in 1960s about a facility that we would know as the Internet, so it was totally simple for him to put 2 and 2 together and get Y2K. Spielberg also did it via his nerd creation of Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park but by 1995 the wheels were well in motion for the Fraud, so this movie had to do a far longer range prophesy.
But let me explain that Dennis [Dennis the Menace to Spielberg] is really Larry, ie Loose-Wire Larry and is a very well know person in the Services Industry. The story says that Larry gets a really great job from his Service Manager - a week on a tropical island servicing the air-con for the luxury resort. So Larry works in the day and parties at night [all expenses paid] and on last day he loosens a vital terminal in the control circuit, in the very back of the main switchboard.
He is hardly back home before there are big problems with the air-con and the locals have not been able to find the fault so Larry is back for another week in paradise. If he is not greedy he will get away with it a few times but risks getting blacklisted in the industry and out of a job forever.
But not for Dennis, ie the so called Y2KProfessionals as there ARE no checks and balances in their industry. The only way to deal with Y2K was litigation but the Y2KProfessionals had money to burn with some $200 Billion defrauded, so they simply paid the lawyers to agree not to disagree.
Spielberg dealt beautifully with all that by having his new prize beasties do a Dr Lecter on Dennis AND the "blood sucking lawyer", so we had a happy ending.
But back to this movie, I made a "monolithic" effort to stay awake in the long boring nerdy parts but sat bolt upright yelling out "Y2K" once we got to the parts where HAL starts to play silly buggers about "false positives" etc, and moreso when the media interviews HAL himself to explain what did or did not go wrong and the reasons behind all that. That of course was the famous situation with the "marking their own exam papers" interviews of the Y2KProfessionals who simply said they had no idea 2000 would come after 1999, so they did not cater for it.
At last there was some GENUINE prophetic content being made in the movie, but more to come folks.
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