Fyre Fraud

Fyre Fraud does not just dunk on McFarland, Ja Rule, and anyone who might be complicit--they’re clowns already, their plainly not-smart choices and astounding arrogance making for super-size schadenfreude. More persuasively, it's a damnation of the mentality that helped make it possible, calling out a culture that progressively puts more value into how you make yourself look online.

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

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.

[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 leans on montages and step-by-step explanations of how Instagram celebrities monetize their sponsored posts and how easily McFarland could use that network to create an event he had no qualifications to run. The Hulu film also has a strange animus toward millennials and is fond of using pop-culture clips to explain simple concepts. ... [Billy McFarland's] involvement gives the Hulu documentary a particularly icky edge.