Released almost simultaneously, two new documentaries share the same focus on last year's Fyre Festival fiasco in which organizers went above and beyond to market a high-class music festival in the Bahamas that spiraled into an epic disaster.  

Approaching the festival from different angles, both documentaries offer fascinating hypothesis into the things that needed to happen for an event to go so wrong, and ultimately point the finger at Billy McFarland -- festival founder who turns up to be a conman of the highest and most-delusional order.

One documentary, however, provides the "better" overall picture of what went down.

Viewers should pick Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, which is more immediate and entertaining than Hulu’s offering. Nevertheless, viewers can obtain a more thorough perspective by watching both.

Fyre is more streamlined in its table-setting and has the dynamics of a thrilling disaster movie. Director Chris Smith, who helmed 2017's Netflix documentary Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond and 1999's cult classic American Movie, starts with a simple question: How does a music festival go so wrong?

Smith goes on to methodically serve up the answer through fascinating interviews with insiders, attendees and, most informatively, with the local laborers who worked non-stop only to end up not getting paid.

Hindsight is 20/20, but the interviews suggest that the disaster was avoidable, and how a combination of greedy ambition, exploitation of the influencer culture, and blind ego trumped common sense. The tension piles up as the festival approaches, with seemingly everyone but McFarland knowing that disaster lay ahead. Fyre lays it out by essentially documenting the snowball effect of constantly avoiding warning signs.

Hulu's Fyre Fraud has a more contemporary approach, somewhat ironically (perhaps symbolically?) editing the documentary with fast-cuts and visual bells and whistles, giving it a "current" touch while portraying millennials almost as much a villain as McFarland.

Indeed, Fraud wants to dig into millennial blame pretty hard, offering a thesis of how the Fyre Festival is the end result of a social media-obsessed youth, grown-ups putting utmost importance on being “liked” and “followed”.

Though it does not do so outright, the documentary comes close to basically mocking the attendees. As if they deserved being swindled out of hundreds or thousands of dollars for a promise of an exclusive, luxurious experience. In the end, they instead get crappy tents and convenience store sandwiches.

Now, anyone who is not a millennial would be tempted to really celebrate these extremely privileged people getting their comeuppance. Heck, footage and interviews with them certainly do not paint them in a positive light in both documentaries (one interviewee speaks cheerily of urinating in the already limited number of tents around his tent to make sure they did not have bothersome neighbors).

Though schadenfreude is a delicious emotional treat, Fraud's generational thesis does not offer any new take on the “millennials are spoiled” argument. Digging deeper into the issue of true privilege would have given the documentary more weight.

With a story that does not really require any spicing up, Hulu documentary's affections feel bitter and actually rather dull in comparison to Netflix’s Fyre. Still, Fraud has a lot of points in also putting to task Jerry Media, the marketing agency behind the festival’s faulty marketing strategy.

Jerry Media is involved in the production of Fyre, justifying Hulu's accusations of Netflix's documentary being biased.

At the same time, Fraud also has an exclusive interview with McFarland -- dampening some of its integrity if Hulu paid him. The interview itself pretty much contains McFarland's unwillingness to comment on certain things or another questionable line from a compulsive liar. It is fair to say that both have their ethical baggage.

Both documentaries are different enough to justify watching them both. If you had to watch only one, Netflix's offering is the more obvious one that is easier to digest -- but Hulu has also managed to give a completely different perspective on what happened, digging deeper into the culture and McFarland as a born swindler. Whichever you pick, it is sure to be a fascinating take on what has to be the most interesting “disaster” to happen to a festival.

***

Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened

(108 minutes, Netflix)

Director: Chris Smith

Fyre Fraud

(96 minutes, Hulu)

Directors: Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason

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