Fyre (2019) - Review
Originally published February 2019Since I'm not on social media as much as the average person, I had no idea what Fyre was or what the Fyre Festival was prior to watching the Netflix documentary about it. Somehow, I managed to miss anything pertaining to this event on my typical news sources when it was relevant, not that I would have cared much. Now that Netflix has produced a documentary about it, Fyre (full name: FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened), it's finally caught my attention and the attention of many other people who seemed to ignore it in the past. With the extra attention it seems to be slowly gathering, the Fyre Festival is likely to become even more infamous.
What is Fyre? If you ever wanted to see what a train wreck looked like, this may be a documentary for you. When I use the metaphor, I mean a train that is over a mile long and the last half of it isn't even aware that the front half has already gone off the rails, over a cliff, and into the ocean, with all the passengers thankfully being able to escape with their lives. The Fyre train is a modern example of how poor planning, denial, and selfish fraudulence at the expense of others could create such a social catastrophe. The passengers may have survived this disaster, but all their dignity and money that they thought they had went down with the train. At the time of this documentary's release, I think some of the train is still plunging into the ocean.
Image: Netflix
Pros
Does a good job at telling you what Fyre was and how it got to the point of infamy
Good background music; note that most of it is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross songs that Netflix is re-using from other movies they've branded and from the Ken Burns Vietnam Documentary
Some of the stories are almost unbelievable and make for a captivating documentary
Provides a variety of perspectives on the whole experience, from the management all the way down to the base employees for both the company and the event
Cons
Would have liked them to focus on the social impact of this event and the hubris around it more and what it says about our society
Not enough information is shared about how the employees of the company made it out
Additional Thoughts
Every few years, it seems like there's a big scam story that rolls through the zeitgeist, affects swaths of people, and captures the public eye enough to warrant a shocking and depressing documentary, or a comedy by Martin Scorsese. The Wolf of Wall Street in the 80's and 90's, Enron in the early 2000s, the loan scams that brought about the financial crisis of 2008-09, and now the Fyre Festival of 2017. What separates the others from the Fyre scam is that they consisted of banks and investments that affected people in disastrous ways, ruining lives and impacting the economy of the country. Their impact was far greater and disastrous as a whole, and their effects can still be felt to this day. Fyre's scam is, thankfully, not as wide-reaching, and mostly comes out as just an unbelievable mess that is fun to laugh at. However, there were still some financial casualties in the process that made what happened not all hilarious schadenfreude.
Image: Netflix
If you are like me and unaware of what Fyre was, the documentary does a good job of cluing you in. Fyre was an app that was developed and produced by a start-up company of the same name (Fyre Media). It was an app that was meant to allow people with deep bank accounts, or organizations, to search for and hire famous talent for their events and gatherings. It had the public and financial support of the rapper Ja Rule, who was a co-founder of Fyre, to give it some notoriety and make people believe that this was a legitimate product with some real potential to deliver. I'm unsure as to how effective the app would have been at doing what it said it could do, as it was still in development when the Fyre Festival happened and is unlikely to ever see the light of day.
Nonetheless, it sure didn't seem to take long for the CEO of Fyre Media, Billy McFarland, to believe in the product. He was living large and partying with his co-founder in the Bahamas and hanging out on islands formerly owned by infamous drug cartel lords. They were partying on yachts with drinks, models, and cigars, and there was plenty of video footage to prove it. These guys were living it up and burning through so much cash that it seemed excessive even for a startup CEO who had the next Facebook in his pocket. But all this partying wasn't just for the sake of having a good time. There was an ulterior motive: marketing.
Image: Netflix
They came up with an idea for a music festival for the most exclusive of crowds. An extremely expensive entry fee would grant you several days in a multi-bedroom villa on a private island in the Bahamas, with live performances from big-named bands while you were there. The festival was branded with the app's name because it was going to be the hottest new party that everyone was going to talk about for years to come. A party like that would undoubtedly hype the app's reputation as that's what the whole app was supposed to do, essentially. At least, that was their thinking. With some clever use of camera footage, a weekend with some supermodels who had significant social media influence, and a few Twitter posts, the Fyre Festival became an instant success and sold old before anyone knew what it was going to be. And when I say 'anyone', I mean the people organizing it as well.
And that's essentially what the documentary is about. It does a good job of introducing you to the product and the people behind Fyre. It gives you the whole story as to why there was even a festival to begin with before it gets to the part where the train goes completely off the rails. Derailment pretty much happens as soon as the Fyre Festival is brainstormed into an idea, but it gets more and more tragically ridiculous at exponential speeds as the day of the festival gets closer and closer. It starts off bad enough with the fact that the team responsible for planning the event and assembling all the different pieces necessary to make it work is given less than a third of the time they normally would have to put on an event. It gets worse when they start making employees of Fyre do jobs that have no experience doing, worse when they have to change locations; and worse when the money starts drying up; and worse when the bands start dropping.
Image: Netflix
You get the idea. It gets even worse from there and turns into a hilarious mess of poor planning that culminates into a Lord of the Flies scenario of chaos by the end. If there weren't any real casualties of this, Fyre would be a fantastic comedy for those of us with a dark sense of humor. The details and stories from the interviews make it all just so absurd and unbelievable, you would think someone wrote this all as one big joke to play on partying rich kids or social media influencers. Unfortunately, as there usually are with scams like this, there were a lot of people who got caught in the middle and lost a lot of their credit, savings, and dignity in the process. They weren't even the ones who paid for the tickets; these were just honest employees who never got paid or who had to deal with the ramifications of a fraud's big dream.
When I finished watching Fyre, I immediately wanted to watch it again. That doesn't necessarily speak to the fact that the documentary itself was so good, because the subject matter did most of the heavy lifting. It's just incredibly entertaining and fascinating to watch the vision of a con artist spiral out of control only to crash and burn so badly. If the documentary does anything right, it's that it allows all the different witnesses and victims to talk at length about their experiences. Everything is edited tightly where it needs to be and, in other areas, it lets the footage speak for itself. It's the right length, it doesn't go into too much detail about any one thing and the pacing keeps the whole adventure going so that, by the end, you are just as astonished as everyone else in the documentary about what all happened. My main criticism is that I would have liked a little more of how something like this is reshaping laws and how those affected by the event, namely the former employees of Fyre and the event itself, have managed to get past it.
Image: Netflix
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Fyre is an entertaining and fascinating documentary. I can think of few other documentaries I have watched in recent memory that made me want to immediately watch it again. There's no real agenda to get in the way, it's just a documentary that is meant to tell a story through interviews and it is a wild story to tell.
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