Fyre Fraud

It is some fairly deep irony when a "documentary" on a subject of exploitative people, using vapid, shallow influencers, to dupe rich kid victims who themselves may have deserved what they got, turns out to be itself exploitative, vapid and meaningless as well. Essentially the makers of "Fyre Fraud" engage in the same cheap marketing and lack of substance as the subject they are covering. We don't even learn why Ja Rule was not jailed

If you want to learn about this festival, the stages of fraud, and just how nasty everyone involved was, read one of the news articles, and skip this documentary which is so shallow and laughably emotional it could have been made by the fraudsters itself.

Two documentaries about the Fyre Festival debacle came out days apart, Netflix's Fyre and Hulu's Fyre Fraud, and each shines in different ways.

The Netflix documentary approach is a methodical chronology. It describes what happened as it happened and how people saw it at the time. It really puts you into the day-by-day experience.

Fyre Fraud takes a different approach. It actually sketches out the basics of the entire thing in the first 15 minutes, then builds upon the various components to create a whole.

The titles actually hint at the different approaches. Fyre describes the Fyre Festival as a slow-mo disaster, only at the end fully revealing the shadiness of Fyre's charismatic creator, Billy McFarland.

Fyre Fraud, on the other hand, immediately establishes Billy as a sleazy con man, and portrays Fyre as a series of shady transactions. Netflix portrays the festival as a disaster, Fyre Fraud as a crime.

Fyre Fraud spends a lot of time framing the Fyre Fraud hysteria within the current culture. It's the sort of pundit "hot take" that is easy to poke holes in, but it's sometimes persuasive. Fraud also has an interview with Billy, although the guy is to slippery to offer much satisfaction.

If you only wanted to watch one Fyre documentary, go for the Netflix one. But after you've seen it if you want more details and a different angle, Fyre Fraud is well worth your time.

"In the millennial era, scamming is the air we breathe." - Jia Tolentino, writer for the New Yorker

'Fyre Fraud' tells the story of a con man pretty well, and also puts it into the larger context of the current generation and social media. Between the cons, enablers, internet influencers, and the entitled, all of them reeking of incredible selfishness, it made me want to weep for humanity.

I was very interested in the Fire festival fiasco when it broke in the spring of 2017. I watched the Netflix documentary first, and then Hulu's Verizon. Overall, I think the Netflix version has a more linear story progression and I like how it focused on the victim impact more so than the Hulu version. This Hulu doc also simply seems more amateur than the Netflix doc. I'm surprised no other reviews have mentioned it, but in this documentary when they want to relay informtaion from a court filing or statement, they have it read by one of those awful computer reading services which just sounds incredibly hokey and is frankly distracting. I've never seen that "artistic" choice in a film before. However, it you are very interested in all the details of this scandal, I would recommend both documentaries as they both contain distinct information. If you're trying to choose between them, then I would recommend the Netflix one over this.

Interestingly, "Fyre Fraud" was released on Hulu a few days before the Netflix documentary on the same subject, the latter of which is the first one I watched.

I found it so compelling that I rushed to watch "Fyre Fraud", having read that both docs had plenty of interesting footage to offer, with this one including an actual interview with the con artist behind the scam, Billy McFarland.

Clips of the interview are inserted here and there, but to be perfectly honest, do not provide much insight or reveal anything shocking, besides providing somewhat satisfactory cringey moments where McFarland seems to be sweating bullets and is seen stuttering in embarrassment after being asked certain questions that he obviously won't/can't answer due to ongoing lawsuits. The tone is not overly confrontational, but they did not shy away from asking tricky questions.

While the Netflix piece had a well-organized, countdown type of structure that documented the lead-up to this disastrous event in great detail then depicted the event itself, both with plenty of on-site footage, "Fyre Fraud" uses a different approach, instead focusing on everything surrounding the event and the more philosophical questions that this literally empty shell raises: is this, to a greater extent, the result of a culture of emptiness? And while "Fyre Fraud" is certainly inferior as far as narrative structure is concerned, it digs deeper than the Netflix doc in its study of "influencers" and millennial culture. While they do not get that much screen time, there are two interviews with influencers who attended the event (no clue what their names are) who, after being candidly asked what an influencer is and how they would describe their "brand" (which is basically themselves and the "lifestyle" that they document, one heavily filtered picture at a time), both answered "positivity" after hesitating for a moment, struggling to find a meaning to something blatantly meaningless.

There are several other people being interviewed, only a minority of which are also interviewed in the Netflix doc. As such, it was interesting to get different perspectives and, in many aspects, both documentaries are very interesting in their own right and could very well have been merged into one lengthy piece. Anyhow, as I was not familiar with the lead-up to the event and how it all unfolded, I'm happy I got to watch both docs in that order, as "Fyre Fraud" really focuses on the fraudulent aspect of it rather than all the cringe-worthy logistic and administrative failures that led to the disaster. My suggestion would be to watch both docs, starting with Netflix's. That way, with "Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened", you'll get a really satisfactory depiction of the facts, including plenty of on-site footage prior to the event and during the event, and then, with "Fyre Fraud", you'll get a better picture of the aftermath, as well as an interesting, more in-depth sociological analysis of the psychological and behavioral traits of a delusional generation obsessed with flashing pictures of a luxurious lifestyle that a serial con man was able to successfully exploit.

On its own, "Fyre Fraud" might feel a bit incomplete if you're looking for actual footage of this disaster. However, as a complement to "Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened", it is highly satisfactory and completes the Netflix piece's deficiencies in terms of social commentary.

That being said, if you have to choose between the two, I would suggest "Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened".