I Watched Both Fyre Festival Documentaries So You Don't Have To

You're welcome in advance, everyone!

THAT'S RIGHT.  I shamelessly and with gusto watched not one, but TWO documentaries about the famously, catastrophically doomed Fyre Festival.  And now, I will summarize them both so you can choose which to watch depending on your preference, or to watch both fully aware of what you're getting yourself into, or watch neither because you're possibly a better person than me!

To be honest, I only remember even hearing of Fyre Festival as it was actively unravelling, so I only hopped aboard the hateration extravaganza when it was already abundantly clear what a fiasco the whole thing was.

Except I do!

It therefore wasn't until the whole thing dramatically fell apart that I saw, for example, this extremely over-hyped advertisement for the festival, which by that point had revealed itself to be a grotesque contradiction of the discomfort, woe, and absurdity that awaited the silly, silly people who paid thousands of dollars to attend this nonsense.

Now, for your schadenfreude-y enjoyment, there are not one, but TWO documentaries available, each promising to help viewers understand just what went wrong.  They varyingly succeed, yet both offer significant entertainment value.

Documentary 1: "Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened" (2019)

Important disclosure alert: this film was co-produced by Jerry Media and Matte Projects, who are responsible for producing some of the promotional materials that ultimately lured the undiscerning monied set to Fyre festival.  This may possibly account for the noticeable absence of anything that might implicate Jerry and/or Matte in the disaster that the festival inevitably became?

If you're looking for a moment-by-moment recreation of the utter catastrophe that was Fyre Festival, this is your film.  It provides enough backstory to make it excruciatingly clear that this festival was never remotely coming together; sure the promotional videos were pretty (thanks Jerry/Matte!) and there was lots of boostery buzz from overpaid "influencers" (I shudder apologetically at using this term and promise never to utter it again) on Instagram, but literally nothing else was actually happening, nor should anyone with any sense have ever thought it was happening.  I've never planned an event more major than a wedding, and it was quite obvious to me that a few months is not enough time to, for example, literally create plumbing and other basic infrastructure from scratch on an undeveloped patch of an island. 

There is very much this sense of Icarus, pumped up on hubris-flavored energy drinks, attempting to reach heights of posh "exclusivity" and crappy EDM, only to plummet to the earth below as his wings of FEMA tents held together with cheese sandwiches melt under the heat of the unforgiving Caribbean sun.  And I am admittedly and somewhat unabashedly here for it.

With that preamble, the movie then spends the majority of its time with the festival-goers as they negotiate the ever-more-obvious train wreck that was Fyre Festival.  In a gleefully spiteful way, it's certainly entertaining.  I don't often like to dwell in that emotional space, but honestly, it's just extremely difficult to muster pity for people with
a) absurd amounts of disposable income that
b) they probably didn't work too hard to earn because
c) THEY SPENT IT ON TICKETS TO FYRE FESTIVAL.

That being said, the film also focuses on the financially devastating consequences for citizens of the island who were recruited to work for the festival, many of whom were not compensated despite being left to bear the brunt of hundreds of hungry, grumpy, entitled festivalgoers.  So there is some fleeting moral center to this movie.

I gave this film a 3.  Stream it on Netflix here.

Documentary 2: "Fyre Fraud" (2019)

For those of us with a true crime bent and therefore wanting a much meatier dive into the "but seriously HOW?" of Fyre Festival, this movie is for you.  It provides a much more thorough, and therefore satisfying, exploration of the super obvious early criminal inclinations of Fyre Festival co-founder Billy McFarland and achieves the notable coup of a first-hand interview with the conman himself.

There is still a decent amount of footage of the actively flailing festival in this film, but it's not so much the centerpiece as the former documentary.  Instead, "Fyre Fraud" looks much more extensively at the spoiler-alert-this-guy-is-obviously-a-criminal-in-the-making before and the wow-some-psychopaths-really-don't-learn after.

Bonus: because it is not face-savingly co-produced by people directly implicated in the failure of the festival, it also does the job of examining how Jerry/Matte and other contributors played a role in attempting to pull off this fraud.  (I would say the movie does a good job of looking at the other major players, but because this wasn't even attempted in the first doc, the comparative nature of "good" is a bit moot.)

I gave this movie a 4.  Stream it on Hulu here.

Enjoy (or don't)!

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