Trainwreck: The Real Project X

Netflix's Trainwreck documentary series has previously covered festivals that went wrong, such as Woodstock '99 and the Astroworld tragedy. Project X, however, was not an official festival; it was a Facebook event.

It began as a birthday party for a 16-year-old girl, but the Facebook event was set to public. This regrettably enabled other users to send out invites, and thousands were sent. Faced with an unmanageable number of guests, the family cancelled it. However, the idea had already gone viral, and copycat events were quickly created on Facebook, attracting ever more attendees.

It was too late. No sooner had one event page been removed than another popped up. This was in 2012, when Facebook was still a relatively new phenomenon. There appeared to be no mechanism to contact the platform directly, and the local municipal authorities and police didn't appreciate the potential for a viral event to attract huge numbers of people. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of invites were sent out.

I know that part of the Netherlands quite well. When people think of the Netherlands, they often picture Amsterdam's nightlife and party scene. However, much of the country, especially in the north-east, is very rural, with picturesque but sleepy small towns. They are conservative with a small 'c' and, as mentioned in the documentary, places where literally nothing happens.

The documentary draws a direct line from the 2012 American film Project X (about a high-school party that spirals into a destructive riot) to the events in Haren. The copycat Facebook events were explicitly named "Project X Haren," which primed attendees to expect chaos and a wild time.

The police, the mayor, and local authorities were simply not prepared. They took no measures to divert people, such as closing roads, and turned down an eminently sensible offer to host a party in a field just outside the town.

A lot of people turned up. Holland has an excellent railway and road network, and Haren is only a couple of hours from Amsterdam. You can get to most places in the country in under three hours, and the town is also very close to the German border.

Before 2014, the legal age to buy alcohol in the Netherlands was 16. Unfortunately, when you have a large number of young people turning up somewhere wanting to have a good time with nothing provided, it's a recipe for disaster. The police got a bit heavy-handed, and a riot ensued.

Of course, watching the show, you feel sorry for the residents and the young girl's family, but it's hard not to see the darkly comedic side of how a simple Facebook event caused thousands of partygoers to descend on a tiny Dutch town. Fortunately, unlike Astroworld, nobody died, so the programme makers were able to present the documentary with a more light-hearted tone.

They didn't get any comment from Facebook about the event, which is a notable omission. In my opinion, Facebook bears significant responsibility for allowing the event to be repeatedly republished with no apparent way for the family or authorities to get it taken down permanently. When the show finished, I said, "I hope they sent Mark Zuckerberg the bill."

I think Merthe is a sweet girl. This was not her fault, perhaps a bit naive. How something like an innocent facebook invitation could get out of hand is truly unbelievable. Therefore, it is a bit of an ok documentary to watch, but otherwise not very interesting. The short-haired man from "Stuk TV" could use some work on his English. That was annoying.

The documentary doesn't add anything about how this could have happened, group behavior, police statements, etc. More time could have been spent on that to make it a bit more interesting. That's a missed opportunity.

PS: In a few reviews, it's said Merthe laughed when she was talking about the rumor she heard of two deaths. Her laughter is clearly one of uncertainty, and right after she falls silent and cries.

Title says it all. A girl wanted to have a nice birthday celebration with her friends and then men stepped in and had to ruin everything. And they're so proud of it. I felt bad for her and her family. Worst episode of the Trainwreck series for me, because I didn't feel entertained, just angry and disappointed.

I don't understand why society is so soft on anarchy. If we set a standard that says we won't tolerate anarchy, society will be a better place. The way to indicate that standard is serious is to debilitate offenders.

That is what should have been done in this case. Why was there no tear gas or rubber bullets? Or real bullets?

Anarchy should not be tolerated, and in this case it was well known to be a potentiality many many days in advance. Let's do better as a society.

ABOUT MY REVIEWS:

I do not include a synopsis of the film/show -- you can get that anywhere and that does not constitute a meaningful review -- but rather my thoughts and feelings on the film that hopefully will be informative to you in deciding whether to invest 90-180 minutes of your life on it.

My scale: 1-5 decreasing degrees of "terrible", with 5 being "mediocre" 6- OK. Generally held my interest OR had reasonable cast and/or cinematography, might watch it again 7 - Good. My default rating for a movie I liked enough to watch again, but didn't rise to the upper echelons 8- Very good. Would watch again and recommend to others 9- Outstanding. Would watch over and over; top 10% of my ratings 10 - A classic. (Less than 2% receive this rating). For Lifetime Movies for Chicks (LMFC), drop the above scale by 3 notches. A 6 is excellent and 7 almost unattainable.

This feels like another superficial attempt by this Trainwreck series to only talk to the participants of what happened, without having a deeper dive or actually any experts who were not involved included in this thing to explain how this happened.

It is extremely clear how illiterate the participants are with technology and don't have a good grasp on how tech, social networks or algorithms work, however the showrunners thought it would be best just to blame this as a human behavior problem and not a technology problem, which is how this problem started in the first place: On Facebook.

This whole event was triggered when one user made the mistake of not setting a birthday party invite to private, saw her mistake, then tried to fix it on Facebook's mobile UI but couldn't because of its limitation to edit invites, and then the FB algorithmic took control to maximize reach to as many users as possible and turned this one mistake into a huge riot.

Additionally, Meta would not remove posts which were promoting the fake event, which multiple people and government officials were saying was not a real party and would also cause major safety concerns.

None of this was discussed during the documentary, and there's appears to be no attempt by the show's producers to out to Meta for a comment. Instead, all the blame was shifted to the people involved, and not the tools or platforms they were using.