Trainwreck: Woodstock '99

As a relatively even-handed look back at the issues which created such a Trainwreck, the insight offered by this series helps create a fuller picture of just what went wrong — and more importantly, how it might be avoided in the future.

So much in this story could have been prevented, and predicted, and this documentary shows its collapse with one compelling passage after the next.

The largely gratuitous Trainwreck (recently retitled from the more evocative Clusterf**k) proves to be surprisingly illuminating. By devoting each 45-minute episode to a single day of the festival—and keeping the self-indulgent tangents that plagued its predecessor, on everything from Napster to nu-metal’s appropriation of rap, to a minimum—director Jamie Crawford (The Interrogator) allows viewers to trace many of the organizers’ biggest missteps.

Trainwreck is a visceral documentation of what it was like to actually be there. It allows its archival footage and interviews with people who were there to speak for themselves a bit more, so that you feel how bad it was, rather than being told how and why it was bad it by a bunch of talking head journalists.

It’s interesting to revisit 1999, to look at the crackly VHS footage and say “What did it all mean?”, especially in the context of the decade that came next. Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 doesn’t dig all the way into those larger questions. But it does offer a primer, and its share of insights.