Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019)

Movie Info

Ja Rule apologized…Ja Rule, you should feel sorry because you are just as guilty as McFarland is.

Billy McFarland had a plan.  On April 28, 2017 to April 30, 2017 and May 5, 2017 to May 7, 2017, he planned to host a massive luxury concert on a private island in the Bahamas.  Privileged investors were going to live large and celebrate with some of the biggest celebrities in music.  It was going to be an influx to the local economy and the money being spent by FYRE on the project just kept going up…but the bottom dropped out.  With lawsuits and angry buyers, the FYRE Festival flopped…and the story behind the failure is exposed!

Directed by Chris Smith, Fyre:  The Greatest Party That Never Happened is a documentary about the 2017 Fyre Festival debacle and the fallout from the events.  The documentary premiered on Netflix on January 18, 2019 and was met with positive reviews.

Fyre is one of those films that preaches the message that if it is too good to be true, it probably is.  It is also movie loaded with schadenfreude where you enjoy seeing the people get burned by “Fyre” because maybe they don’t deserve it, but they also are drinking the Kool-Aid of self-inflated importance.

If you base your trips on tweets and Instagram, you could have a problem…

What Billy McFarland did was a crime.  He knew full well that he didn’t have the acts, the housing, or the money to pull off Fyre Festival…but he did it anyway.  There were a lot of comparisons to Woodstock being dropped, but Woodstock was a festival that turned into a free concert and wasn’t financially successful.  The film demonstrates that he has a compulsive character flaw to try to scam people and even shows him in the act of conning people after the Fyre Festival with the belief that he wouldn’t get in trouble despite the fact he hired a man to record the event.  Yet, you get all these people talking about his “genius”…that’s why it is hard to feel sorry for those around him.

The followers of McFarland are painted as victims, but most of his company workers and people working on the job knew that the Fyre Festival was failing, and continued to back McFarland in the hopes of getting their money.  While dropping out of a hand of poker may cost you money, you don’t lose face (or face legal charges) and that is what these people did by sticking to it.  A lot was made of Andy King’s order to give a blow-job for water to a customs person and that it was harassment.  If he is willing to lower himself to that level for a con-man, I lose sympathy for him.

The absurdity isn’t that he asked you to perform oral sex to get water (people are ass*!@#s)…the absurdity is that you didn’t have enough pride in yourself to tell him to F-off.

The next problem are the “influencers”.  These are people with rampant followers on Instagram and other social media platforms that promoted Fyre Festival in exchange for pay or compensation at the festival.  They say they didn’t know it would fall through…which is true, but if you are willing to tie your name to a product for money, you have to take responsibility for that product.  Like McFarland, they for some reason have people who believe in them…and these people are dumb enough to put a ton of money toward going to the Bahamas (something that in the big picture is relatively inexpensive if you shop around for vacations) because they think they are invincible and deserving of free…people streaming their sadness in the documentary didn’t make me feel sorry for them.

Fyre:  The Greatest Party That Never Happened is an interesting documentary about some of the social problems in society and reflects the problem with certain members of society.  The people of the Bahamas that were fleeced by McFarland are probably the only real innocent people in this documentary because they are trying to make a living and their lives are built on tourism.  When I posted I was watching the documentary, I mentioned influencers…and immediately got a message to visit a site through Twitter on big influencers.  That’s funny.