The subject matter is gold. Fyre documents the disaster that was the 2017 Fyre Festival, a supposedly exclusive luxury music event on a private island in the Bahamas. Attendees paid in the tens of thousands to mingle with supermodels and listen to the likes of Migos and Blink-182 while dining on high-end specialty foods. Instead, they arrived to disaster tents, portable toilets, and slices of cheese on bread (all of which was well-documented on social media). The documentary, directed by Chris Smith, traces how the project was doomed from the start as the brainchild of Billy McFarland, a con man who ended up in prison after all was said and done. So the schadenfreude is thick, and it’s tempting to watch thinking everyone got what they deserved, until Smith’s camera settles on the Bahamian restaurant owner who says she lost $50,000 in savings because she was never paid for her efforts. Such first-person accounts dominate the film, along with copious amounts of the social-media footage that initially sold the dream that never became a reality. A bit more investigative work on the part of the filmmakers might have gone a long way, especially because there is something of a black hole at the center of Fyre: McFarland is depicted as ground zero in terms of responsibility, but we never get a real sense of who the guy is, what drives him, or how he was able to pull the wool over so many eyes. The footage we see presents a boozing jet-skier in a backwards baseball hat—fun to sneer at, but nothing more than that.
