Supposedly, a contender for Netflix’s biggest actual competitor isn’t another studio’s streaming service or even the general practice of leaving the house, but streaming-video pioneer YouTube.
The near-universally used site has become, among other things, a go-to hub for content creators (read: semi-professionals) to disseminate (or regurgitate) obvious points better-made elsewhere. Never does the idea of Netflix competing with YouTube make more sense than when watching the streaming giant’s popular series of documentaries under the Trainwreck banner.
Marketed as individual documentaries rather than episodes of an ongoing show, the Trainwreck sorta-movies re-examine media phenomena and/or scandals, typically from relatively recent history—a lack of larger cultural context often feels like a shared mission of content creators at both Netflix and YouTube.
Though the first documentary profiled the epic screw-up of Woodstock ’99, most subsequent Trainwrecks have addressed material from deeper into the internet age: Balloon Boy, the Poop Cruise, and now a 2019 incident where a jokey Facebook post turned into not one but two real-life events in Trainwreck: Storm Area 51, hitting Netflix July 29.
If an Area 51-themed shitpost brought to life doesn’t seem quite as memorable as the Astroworld tragedy or the web of sleaze surrounding American Apparel, that may be part of this installment’s appeal. Some journalists interviewed in Storm Area 51 freely admit that they were assuming the whole thing would turn into something like “Fyre Festival 2.0,” as multiple people refer to it.
But there’s far less capitalism run amok in the story of Matty Roberts, a then-20-year-old who created a Facebook event inviting attendees to “storm” the Nevada military base informally known as Area 51, long associated with government secrets and (more fancifully) aliens. As the post unexpectedly went viral, Matty’s attempt to make its joke status more clear by invoking an anime character (“if we Naruto run we can move faster than their bullets”) only fueled its popularity. Soon millions had signed up, and the military became genuinely concerned about the planned citizen siege, months out.
It’s a funny story that Storm Area 51 tells in excruciating yet still largely superficial detail. Because interest in the event was conveyed largely through memes, the movie resorts to, well, showing a bunch of them, threatening to turn into a feature-length repost.
There are also dramatic re-enactments of rudimentary Google searches. The characters interviewed here simply aren’t all that colorful. Matty is an affable guy, easily overwhelmed by his sorta-creation, and worried that he’ll be held liable if two million people really show up for it. Connie West, owner of a campsite and restaurant near the area in question, has her facilities booked up quickly, and becomes willing to help host some kind of event, though what she or anyone else has in mind is never really specified. A couple of promoters attempt to swoop in and “help” with sponsorships or band bookings; Storm Area 51 is as vague about their intentions as they are.
Maybe some viewers will be genuinely uncertain as to whether this event (which was eventually split into two decidedly different events) ended in massive disaster. But those familiar with the eventual outcome may wonder why it warrants a documentary at all, while those unfamiliar will likely find the answers painfully drawn out.
Though some other Trainwreck docs have run no longer than a TV episode, this one is a two-parter, lasting nearly 100 minutes. It should not take this long to explain a bunch of memes, highlight a few opportunistic YouTube dopes who booked travel into the desert, and explain the mounting pressures on this sorta-festival’s accidental organizers, as well as military and local law enforcement tasked with figuring out the appropriate level of preparation.
This is an area where a garden-variety, surface-level YouTube content creator could come in handy, because there is, generously, about 20 minutes’ worth of interesting novelty and vague insight about the power of the internet here. Even the latter is rendered as kind of a shrug—online stuff, am I right?—without speaking seriously to the oddly enduring cultural appeal of Area 51 as a mythical conspiracy.
At its chosen level, Trainwreck: Storm Area 51 would be a perfectly adequate explainer video, provided it could be trimmed down by about 75 percent. As a feature-length documentary, it’s a slickly empty shaggy-dog story.
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