End of Days (1999): A Nineties Time Capsule of Y2K Fear and Religious Panic How Millennium Anxiety, Faith, and Chaos Collided at the Turn of the Century

For my Nineties Friday Blog for 1/16/26 I went back and rewatched End of Days (1999), a movie that absolutely screams late-90s energy in the best and worst ways possible. This film lives right at the crossroads of Y2K paranoia, religious anxiety, and peak Schwarzenegger era excess. It’s loud, grimy, a little ridiculous, and yet somehow more thoughtful than it gets credit for.

At its core, End of Days is about the literal end of the millennium and the fear that something ancient, evil, and unstoppable was lurking right behind the clock striking midnight. Satan shows up, walks around New York like a Wall Street creep, and starts stacking bodies. That alone tells you exactly what kind of movie this is. Subtlety is not invited, and that’s honestly part of the charm.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Jericho Cane, a broken ex-cop who’s lost everything and is basically running on booze, guilt, and rage. This isn’t the invincible Terminator version of Arnold. He’s tired, depressed, and spiritually hollow, which actually works well for the story. The film leans hard into the idea that faith, or the lack of it, is just as important as firepower.

Gabriel Byrne’s portrayal of Satan is one of the highlights. He’s calm, smug, and unsettling in a way that feels more realistic than a horned monster ever could. This is Satan as temptation, manipulation, and ego, not fire and brimstone theatrics. His performance carries a lot of the film’s weight and gives it a creepiness that sticks.

The movie clearly reflects the cultural mood of the late 1990s. People were uneasy, suspicious of institutions, and increasingly cynical about religion, government, and authority. End of Days taps directly into that. The Church isn’t portrayed as all-knowing or all-powerful, law enforcement is overwhelmed, and chaos feels inevitable. It mirrors a society that felt like it was losing control as the calendar flipped.

Visually, the film is dark, rain-soaked, and aggressively grim. New York feels claustrophobic and hostile, almost like a character itself. The action scenes are brutal, the effects are very late-90s, and while some moments haven’t aged perfectly, the atmosphere still works. It looks exactly like a movie made by people convinced something terrible might actually happen when the year 2000 arrived.

What really holds the movie together is its theme of redemption. Jericho isn’t trying to save the world out of heroism. He’s trying to find a reason to keep living. The film argues that belief isn’t about blind faith, but about choosing to stand against evil even when you’re broken. That message lands harder than you’d expect from a movie with this much chaos.

End of Days isn’t a masterpiece, and it was never meant to be. It’s messy, over-the-top, and unapologetically of its time. But it’s also sincere, ambitious, and weirdly honest about fear, despair, and hope at the edge of an uncertain future. As a late-90s artifact, it absolutely earns its place, and revisiting it now feels oddly relevant in ways it probably never intended.