If you were entertained by the documented disasters of the Fyre Fest, then the re-examination of the many failures of Woodstock 1999 will provide that same rubbernecking fascination. With twenty years of clarity, the varied interview subjects, from wiser attendants to music journalists to the promoters themselves, try to best account for where things went so horribly wrong. Director Garret Price (Love, Antosha) methodically assembles the pieces that lead to Woodstock 1999 literally going up in smoke by the end of its volatile, three-day festival. Price opens the film, now available on HBO Max, by saying he viewed Woodstock ’99 not as some incredulous comedy, like the immediate response to the Fyre Fest, but as “a horror movie.” That’s an accurate summation, but it also plays out like a tragedy born of incompetence and ignorance.

In some ways, this is far worse than the Fyre Fest, which drew widespread mockery and couldn’t even get off the ground with its fledgling festival. Woodstock ’99 was born of a desire to further cash-in on the brand of the seminal concert experience, but the promoters made significant decisions that would later spell their doom in the name of capitalism. Festival planners Michael Lang and John Schuer lament that in ’69 and ’94 so many people got in for free by slipping under flimsy fences. This was going to be corrected, and so ’99 was set on an old Air Force base with a razor-wire fence line. The base was woefully ill-equipped to host a multi-day festival. The copious blacktop was reflective of the scorching heat and the infrastructure wasn’t present for the human scope of waste management. The port-a-potties were quickly overrun and overflowing, and in one of the most stomach-churning moments, festival attendants are seen rolling in what they think is mud, much like in 1994, but it was actually human feces. Hundreds of people had to be carted out from dehydration, and one person died. Bottled water was four dollars, the same price as the beer, and the “free water” stations were quickly compromised by drunk festivalgoers breaking them or bathing in the supply. The hundred-degree temperatures were boiling the thousands of attendants who slept under meager shadows of boxes and carts where they could. The two main stages were literally a mile apart, which required long walks in powerful heat and without adequate hydration and hygienic installations. The festival put together a line-up packed with artists and points of attraction, from all-night raves to a skate park to a film festival to advocacy boards gathering signatures and passing out free candles (whoops). They just didn’t plan on the needs of the festivalgoers. They only saw them as consumers, people to buy buy buy, and not as guests needing to be properly cared for too. The old ’69 festival meant to symbolize the Counterculture was selling overpriced T-shirts and water on a military base? The cascading results of tragedy and chaos are already in play by day one of the three days. From there, it’s waiting and watching missteps add up until its calamitous and fiery conclusion.

Where the movie starts to lose its focus is when it aims to make Woodstock ’99 a significant and important statement about a shift in culture. It seems clear to me that the reason that everything went so disastrously wrong in ’99 was because of its poor planning and lack of foresight, oblivious and enabling promoters, and its misreading of its audience. I’m not going to broadly categorize every lover of Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock as a wannabe fraternity bro looking for vulnerable women to harass. That’s unfair. Lang and Schuer place heavy blame on Fred Durst whipping up the audience into a froth of impressionable anger. The movie’s many interview subjects also take more time to describe the makeup of the people at the festival as young, white, male, and aimlessly angry. They blame the musical artists for the destruction and chaos of ’99, but who hired these bands and scheduled them, huh? Who hired Jewel to perform before Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine? These same rock bands being singled out for blame toured together under the imprinter of the Family Values Tour, and not one of those stops resulted in the destruction and fury of Woodstock ’99. It’s the same crowd, right, and even more condensed together, so then why weren’t the results repeated? Because the music, whatever you think of it artistically, and there’s plenty to grouse about with its misogyny and general ear-sludge quality, is not to blame for the failures of bad management and lapsed security.

As a meaningful epoch in society, Woodstock ’99 doesn’t quite add up with the import that several interview subjects want to project onto it. The problem is the mystique of Woodstock itself. The 1969 festival is a cultural touchstone for the Boomer generation, but it’s also been cultivated thanks to selective memory, nostalgia, and media myth-making. The negatives and failures of the original three days, like the fires and deaths and logistical shortcomings, are mitigated by the perception of the festival and its five-and-a-half-hour Oscar-winning 1970 documentary. The reality of the festival was transformed into a transcendent experience that never really existed as advertised, and so when Land and Schuer repackaged Woodstock for a new generation, they had a willing audience ready to have their own generation-defining experience. The ’99 festival isn’t any more of a meaningful cultural statement as was the fabled ‘69 festival. It was just crass commercialism disguising itself as “peace, love, and rock and roll,” and no different than the hopeful influencers and Millennials that flocked to the Fyre Fest. It’s all selling a cultivated perception. Woodstock ’99 has no more lasting cultural impact than any Coachella festival. It came at a bizarre crossroads in time between music, technology, and a coarsening of masculinity, but that doesn’t mean that it was some larger truth being revealed. The assertions to provide larger, thematic meaning come across as too searching.

Another sticking point for me is that the film criticizes the exploitation of women and yet the movie falls under the same traps of exploitation for questionable value. Price’s gamut of condemnations for the ’99 promoters hits a level of extra righteous fury when it comes to the treatment of the female attendants, many of whom were groped, sexually assaulted, and raped. Lang and Schuer acknowledge the lecherous behavior of the heavy population of agro-males but dismiss the accusations of sexual violence as statistically minimal for the massive three-day festival. In the documentary’s most incendiary moment, Schuer accuses the very women who elected to go topless of being culpable for their own assaults. Rightfully so, Price immediately cuts from this noxious statement to a female journalist who calls out this jaw-dropping example of gross victim blaming. Not every woman who was groped or assaulted even chose to go topless; many of them were simply vulnerable and present and could not get away. The documentary discusses at great length the reality of the prevalence of sexual assault during the ’99 fest, enough so that even the lead singer from The Offspring was pleading onstage with the revved-up audience to stop molesting women who just wanted to crowd surf in peace.

The consideration the movie shows is just and justified; however, this advocacy is muddled by Price’s prurient editing decisions. His interview subjects, and by extension the perspective of the filmmaker, admonishes the pay-per-view cameras for seeking out as many exposed breasts as possible to satiate its young male audience. This included scenes of women flashing their breasts but also women having their clothes ripped from their bodies. This exploitation is echoed in Price’s problematic editing. There are dozens and dozens of topless women intertwined throughout the movie and, most troubling, scenes of women being molested, women desperately trying to pull their tops back into place while grabby hands reach for their exposed bodies. I can understand not wanting to dull the disturbing reality of what these women endured but how many visual examples do we need to make the point stick? How many examples of literal molestation, groping, and assault should the audience endure? Is this onslaught of visual examples not further exploiting these same young women and their trauma? Price could have even obscured the identities of the victims or blurred out their nudity, something that would have felt more in keeping with the righteous indignation and consideration to the victims. Even if you could argue seeing this is necessary to understand, do we need to see dozens of victims?

An unintentional connection I made with the documentary was with the promoters, who definitely come across as negligent and defensive. Lang and Schuer are combative early in the archival footage, jostling with journalists asking pertinent and critical questions about the failures of the festival as they are happening. These two old men, who misread the nostalgia the ’99 crowd had for their own Boomer culture, point the finger of blame at anyone else. To them, it’s MTV’s fault because their coverage made the festival look like a hellish nightmare. To them, it’s the band’s fault for not defusing audience anger. To them, it’s the fault of the women for being groped and abused. To them, it’s the fault of the security team for not upholding order, never mind that these people only had to pass a three-hour course where they were given the answers for. To them, it’s everyone’s fault but their own, and this dismissive scapegoating reminds me, in many ways, of President Donald Trump and his own complaints about media coverage. For the former president, it’s not his cruel and inept policies that were bad, it was merely the skewered media coverage and thus the media was to blame. Hey, if Woodstock ’99 interview subjects are going to make sweeping cultural statements, then why not me too?

The Woodstock ’99 documentary is a fascinating train wreck to relive with some questionable artistic decisions that can distract or mitigate its power and entertainment value. It’s a definitive look at a disaster of an attempt to recapture something that was ineffable and unattainable. I don’t believe there’s a larger lesson to be learned, beyond criticisms of capitalism and poor planning. It’s hard to watch at times, infuriating at others, and deserving of scorn and eye-rolls. There hasn’t been an attempted Woodstock festival since 1999 and it’s time to let it go.

Nate’s Grade: B