In 2019, the wreckage of the now notorious failed Fyre festival was the subject of an entertaining Netflix documentary. But while Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened was an exercise in schadenfreude, the three-part series Trainwreck: Woodstock 99 (Netflix), which depicts the doomed revival of the 1969 peace-and-love festival, is a much darker portrait of mob rule, exploitation and misogyny.
A brisk and often horrifying watch, Trainwreck is effective at ramping up the tension and building a sense of dread and impending disaster. Each episode follows a day of the festival, from an optimistic start on Friday through to the apocalyptic scenes in the early hours of Monday morning, using a ticking clock to count down to each fresh catastrophe. From the start, its organisers freely admit that their intention was to make as much money as they could. In 1994, there had been another Woodstock revival, but the fences were breached and it didn’t turn a profit. By the time the 1999 event was pulled together, an eight-mile perimeter fence was erected around a decommissioned airbase, many of the crucial infrastructure tasks had been cheaply outsourced, and independent food and drink vendors were allowed to charge as much as they wanted for water and sustenance. It was hot, there was minimal shade and 250,000 punters grew increasingly irate.
