Trainwreck: Storm Area 51

One night, Matty Roberts puts up a joking post on his Facebook page calling for Area 51 to be stormed. The public event gains massive following, and the authorities prepare for an influx in Nevada.

If you ever want a documentary with a massive anti-climax, it has to be this one. There's something of a similarity between this story and another recent Trainwreck release, The Real Project X. If you're wanting carnage, go to that one instead.

This Trainwreck series is a little hit and miss; this isn't one of the best episodes so far. The fact that Pornhub wanted to sponsor the event, I think that tells you all you need to know. I think a lot of people saw a lot of dollar signs and an excuse to make money and grab fifteen minutes of fame.

It's watchable in a way, but the story is almost cartoon-like, with big, brash people and big ideas, no concern for anyone other than themselves, suing people. It doesn't exactly show you humanity at its finest.

A bit of a misfire. Like a bad cartoon.

5/10.

Far more interesting than recent Trainwreck episode "Real Project X" (in which many kids showed up to a birthday party and, for some reason, we know about it), this story involves a better variety of testimonies, with higher stakes considering the location, and a fairly intricate backstory where half-baked internet ideas go head-to-head with reality.

Social media dwellers are a parody of themselves at this point, and anyone with a couple decades will immediately roll their eyes at the immature elements of this doc, but it's still a fun study of people with lives that permit ideas like "let's storm a government base because aliens and party" before facing humility.

Not exactly something you do if you have priorities, but still hilarious to watch, like seeing Johnny Knoxville and pals invent idiotic stunts for your amusement. The silliness is balanced out by interviews with town locals, military, and other grown-ups who live in reality. When all the parts mix in the end, not much happens besides some partying, but thankfully it didn't go the other way resulting in tragedy.

I'm not sure it had to be split into 2 episodes. Yet I didn't feel like much time was wasted if viewed as a single film. It's ultimately a familiar lesson: reality wins against absurdist notions from the internet. But rarely do we see it done so uniquely, and at least a few people got a dance party out of it.

How do you police a joke?

That was what the FBI agent states at the very end of this overly long and drawn out story about a bunch of nerds with nothing better to do but drive into the desert for attention.

If any recent Netflix documentary best describes modern America it is this one. A stupid kid posting an event as a joke gets taken seriously that a group of conspiracy nutjobs, attention seeking influencers and random weird alien obsessed people decide to take seriously and actually attend.

What follows is this kid being out of his depth as he works with a conman who didn't want to put any of his own money into the event, a local business woman who got greedy and alienated (no pun intended) the rest of her town and a modern day mafioso who tried to scam her which she thankfully backed out of.

That's not even taking into account all the media attention it got or the response of the military in dealing with a potential threat on a US military base. It truly was the best example of a trainwreck in this series.

Unfortunately, the filmmaking let's it down with weird editing choices, random animation sequences and splitting it into two parts which hasn't been done in the other trainwreck documentaries for a story that didn't seem to offer much in the end.

Nobody comes out looking good at the end of this and all it did was showcase how easy it is to manipulate a generation of young adults raised on social media with ADHD, brain-rot and no ambition other than to be famous on the internet.

If Netflix wants to keep making these it would be nice if they made one that had serious consequences instead of them all being a playful joke but maybe that's wishful thinking.

Overall, it is a strange story told in a strange way with the actual 'storming' of Area 51 happening in the last ten minutes. It would have been nice to get different interviews from the locals on life after this event and what has been done to prevent it from happening again but with people's dependency on social media only becoming more and more important it's more likely to happen again sooner rather than later.

But here's the real deal, she saw and felt nothing but dollar signs and the cool liquid coinage of Scrooge McDuck - come now, as if your whole life wasn't adding up to this moment - at least YOU believed - one doesn't consider selling thier house to bankroll some stoner dreamscape, when they don't see a massive back end - ok ok ok, objectively re this documentary : didn't need to be told and not really a trainwreck, more like a failed happenstance and symptom of perils of social media - whatever.

Do the majority of Americans suffer from Peter Pan Syndrome? Why would anyone really believe the 'event' was real? The meme guy is a loser who could have easily told everyone it was a joke the first day, but no; he wanted his 15 minutes of fame - get a haircut and a real job dude!

The wayward and Spoiled youth of America has become a way of life since the late '50s and it will continue it seems until hopefully someone alerts them to the fact that being a responsible adult begins at 18 years of age, in some countries that would be 16 years old.

Meme guy doesn't care about the amount of tax payers money that was used to secure his 'event' or the debt the that woman is in because of him, he should have been charged with reckless behavior.