There’s an immense satisfaction watching rich people get duped. Think of Robin Hood or even a millennial Jordan Belfort, recruiting the Instagram generation with supermodels like Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner or Bella Hadid, with the allure of affluence and a perfect caption to match.
Tech entrepreneur Billy McFarland is a charming salesman who is shown living the high life alongside famed business partner Ja Rule. Cutting to montages and vox pops of him at conferences, houseboats or encouraging his colleagues in the office, he’s initially an early day dreamer who sees his next assignment as pulling off an elite music festival on a private island as almost another day’s work.
You want him and his team to succeed.
At least, at first.
What begins as delusional and idealistic spirals into absolute chaos. Simple considerations like logistics (i.e, no one considered where to put the portaloos) or the realisation that they had sold more tickets than they could house guests were the tip of the iceberg. As the seams begin to unwind, the team becomes more and more enshrined in their own sense of optimistic problem solving, all the while denying that a project of this scale was even feasible to begin with. Key headline acts begin to drop out (notably Blink 182), the caterers are not allocated enough funds to barely even feed the guests on the island and there are desperate images of labourers working around the clock to construct the Festival stage and surrounding arenas.
It’s a cautionary tale of over-estimating one’s ability, and taps into the pscyhe of a generation hooked on the premise of a few supermodel endorsements, and the far-reaching consequences of a few timely social media posts. Contrasting the polished, heavily glamourised posts of a few celebrities against the viral tweet of a basic sandwich that laughs in the face of the original promise of ‘personalised chefs,’ in a luxury dining experience.
Fan favourite and key financier Andy King encapsulates the very meaning of what being a team player is, and when you finally get to his story, it’s nothing short of horrifying. Arguably, every interviewee in this tale is somewhat complicit in the disaster, and the documentary suggests that even “just doing your job” can hinder a cause that you believe in more than help solve the very problem that you’re trying to fix.
Above all, there’s some guilty pleasure, schaudenfraude even, in seeing how primal sophisticated socialites get when faced in a Hunger Games situation for shelter, security and even beds.
We’ll toast our Evian waters to that.
Now showing on Netlix.
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