Fyre Fraud

Whatever the Hulu film may have paid McFarland for an interview, it didn’t get its money worth. Still, “Fyre Fraud” edges out Netflix’s film by stepping back and delivering on the stronger, more despairing theme here, which is very clearly this: Society (not just those who were born in the 1980s or ’90s) is losing its ability to sense a snake in the grass. Both “Fyre Fraud” and “Fyre” should give any viewer pause to reflect--and reflect again--on the degree to which we’re all being had.

“Fyre Fraud” paints a picture of an entire ecosystem of scamming, a richer and more rewarding portrait.

“Fyre” is fine. “Fyre Fraud” is better. ... It has arguments to make about the insecurities of millennials and the perniciousness of social media. And the arguments don’t feel like blather.

Nason and Furst's Fyre Fraud is a valuable companion piece for how it widens the scope, examining the ways in which Fyre Fest was born from the muck of lives lived virtually.

Fyre Fraud goes a few steps further [than Netflix's Fyre], not only placing the idea for the festival in a broader historical context but acknowledging the parallels between McFarland and other high-profile grifters, including one who had risen to the highest office in the land at the same time Fyre Festival was being planned.

Fyre Fraud is a little zippier and pop culture-y in its skewering [than Netflix's Fyre].

Fyre Fraud, despite its efforts to go after the larger picture, ends up being a frothier and more light-hearted affair, replete with stock photo and cartoon cutaways overlaid with jaunty music cues, overemphasizing the absurdity Fyre has the confidence to know is hardwired into its narrative. [But it is] a helpful reminder that, like so many stories, one account can’t contain the whole truth.

Despite Fyre Fraud’s unique access, the insights into McFarland tend to come from other sources. As far as Billy McFarland is concerned, his mistake was that he dreamed too big and got in over his head. ... Neither movie is perfect, and each underlines the other’s flaws, but if you’re watching one, watch Fyre, which is both less self-righteous and less inclined to punctuate its insights with Family Guy clips.

[Fyre Fraud] immediately declares Fyre to have been the defining nonevent at the intersection of social-media illusion and bricks-and-mortar realities, which is a perfectly reasonable premise, but a less than wieldy one. The results are scattershot, and less cinematically satisfying than Mr. Smith’s elegantly constructed takedown.

Fyre Fraud tries to draw connections between what happened with Fyre Festival and larger cultural trends, like the existence of Instagram influencers and the phenomenon of FOMO, to which millennials are particularly susceptible, at least according to the documentary. (At times their methods, unfortunately, seem a bit slipshod.) It is, in essence, a think piece.