Pyre for Fyre

FYRE: 
THE GREATEST PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED (2019)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

A party on a remote island with about 50 people might work without a hitch. A music festival with 5,000 tickets sold on an island that was not an island is tantamount to disaster. "Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened" documents the day-to-day goings-on of a music festival that was coming apart in shambles, and the organizers knew it was unworkable and still persisted. Hubris at its most defining with greed running rampant over logic and common sense.

Billy McFarland is the would-be, millennial entrepreneur who promises a world of riches and all anyone got in return were cheap sandwiches and a room with a view but no toilet. That is exactly what happened with the announcement of Fyre Festival, a new music festival that would appeal to those who presumably like Burning Man minus installations and, you know, common sense. Fyre was originally scheduled to be held on an island once owned by Pablo Escobar, and then it was finally held in one of the Bahamian islands, specifically the Great Exuma (not an island exactly but perpetrated as one on social media posts and falsely and continuously advertised as Escobar's island). So, in case you didn't hear about it in the news, the debut of Fyre Festival was not to be - it was a manufactured hoax where a few thousand people had their money bilked. Some dubious website designers fell for the scam for what they thought was a legitimate music festival. Ja Rule, the rapper, is also one of the founders of Fyre who may or may not have hoped for the Music Festival of the 21st century.

As we learn more about this faux music fest, we are inundated with details about supermodels flown in for Instagram shoots; support from paid social media influencers like Kendall Jenner; exchange of money and hustling for the green at last-minute intervals; building white tents that look like they are ready to blow off the ground easily; confusion and disarray over how to fly in guests to the island; legitimate online complaints from customers that were deleted so as to not ruin the brand, and an organizer who is ready to, um, perform fellatio just to satisfy...oh, I would not dream of giving away that nasty bit of information away.

Shrewdly directed by Chris Smith, "Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened" is often frustratingly fascinating yet quite repetitive - after a while, I could not take much more of McFarland, a con-artist masquerading as some sort of pseudo-hip, technologically savvy booking agent/partygoer who lives for the high life of sunlit Bahamian beaches and sexy, bikini models. I was not the least bit sympathetic to him or any of his ship of fools who took the money and ran. As aforementioned, some of the people involved behind-the-scenes are not entirely to blame but they knew this festival was a disaster practically from the get-go. I mean, Blink-182 even opted out!