Australian release schedules for non-blockbusters are horrible. It's probably something you'll hear me complain about a lot, particularly later in the year. A case in point is the Fyre documentaries. Two documentaries on the same subject (the disaster that was the Fyre Festival), coming into direct competition with each other by releasing in the same week. Or, at least, they did for most people. While Netflix, being pretty reliable (still waiting on that Wandering Earth movie everybody's talking about, though), released their documentary, Fyre, at the same time as everybody else, due to Hulu not existing in Australia, we had to wait months before Fyre Fraud finally premiered on Channel Seven the other night, meaning that Australian cinephiles missed out on the whole conversation surrounding the two and which one is better. Still, I'm going to belatedly join the conversation anyway.
As for which one is most worth a watch, my best advice is to watch both. Watching both of them together will give you the fullest picture of the dumpster fyre (ahem) and its various failures. I'd recommend starting with Netflix's one as it assumes the least knowledge about the events of the festival, but either one is fine. However, if you for some reason can only watch one, it really depends on what stuff you most want to see from a documentary about the Fyre Festival. If you want a chronological retelling of everything that went wrong with the Festival, all the financial and infrastructure problems, with Billy McFarland as a main character and plenty of footage from the people behind the scenes. If you want to get a good picture of the man behind the whole thing, McFarland, and a look at the context surrounding it, watch Fyre Fraud.
As far as Fraud on it's own, I feel it is the stronger of the two. The addition of an actual interview with McFarland gives it an extra credibility that puts it above the Netflix one, particularly given (as this one smugly points out in the closing moments) given that the latter was produced by Jerry Media, the people behind the festival in the first place.
Fraud skips gracefully over the lead-up to the festival, perhaps recognising that Netflix had already cornered that market with it's insider information from Jerry Media. Instead, it spends it's time looking at the events preceding and following the festival, including a brief look at McFarland's life up to the point where the documentary starts (including his previous cons that act as precursors to Fyre), as many interviewees make observations and try to dig into his psyche. McFarland himself gives very guarded responses to the interviewer's pretty difficult, at times fairly hostile questions ('has anyone ever called you a compulsive liar?' 'I've been called a lot of things, since the Festival.'). At times, however, he appears to let his guard down and show some genuine remorse, but the documentary is always quick to admit that these moments could just be another scene in the con act that is his life. As it often points out, McFarland has been scamming people for years.
Another aspect that strengthens this iteration of the Fyre Festival documentary is it's examination of the current culture, particularly on the Internet, built around Millennial and brewing toxicity that can so easily be exposed by an event like Fyre. The film repeats the phrase, 'it's a great time to be a con man', and it is so true. We live in an age where con artists no longer have to work to gain our trust; all it takes is a bad link, or an ad on a message board, and within seconds they're siphoning hundreds, even thousands of dollars from you. These links and ads highlight the Western world's current materialistic views. These days, the entrepreneurs are not young CEOs of oil companies or whatever, they are twenty-something vloggers, essentially selling themselves and their lifestyles. We want to emulate them, to own the stuff that they own, and internet con artists appeal to this 'need', giving us ads for free iPhones and stuff like that.
Fraud, unlike Fyre, is also surprisingly funny. It drops in clips from TV shows like The Office and Family Guy (which are made even more hilarious by the context the documentary is putting them in), and it's effective editing drops in things like a photo montage of McFarland water-skiing when he should be solving problems to great comic effect.
Overall, I thought this was a breezy, funny, efficient and thoughtful documentary. It doubles as something on the side of dark comedy while also being a character study of a real life story. It's editing is spot on and often hilarious, and the interviews are quite revealing. It's not as profound as this review might make it seem, but it will definitely give you some food for thought, and it makes a great double feature with Netflix's documentary on the same topic.
Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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