उपयोगकर्ता समीक्षाएं

I want to start by saying that the mayor (Rob Bats) is the main responsible for this big mess and the real victims were the locals that got their stores destroyed and vandalized.

And don't get me wrong: Trainwreck is producing a lot of great documentaries, such as Astroworld, Poop Cruise, Woodstock '99, etc - but for the love of God, this story is so boring and, be honest: like myself, you only watched this documentary because of Trainwreck and because Merthe and her friends decided to link "Project X" to her 'amazing' birthday party.

Netherlands must be a paradise to live in because this documentary only showed, at least to me, that they have nothing interesting to do with their lives.

I mean, even the thief said "I woke up and people were tagging my name all over on Facebook, so I decided to go back and bring back everything that I stole"

The vibe that I got the whole time was "white people problems".

"I kept the brick that destroyed my car" ??? Dude... C'mon...Are you 5?

Thankfully, no one got seriously injured, no one died, but people were overreacting due to a Facebook event made by a 16-year old kid and if you remove the great production behind this documentary and if you remove the keyword "Project X", no one would actually care.

I don't understand why society is so soft on anarchy. If we set a standard that says we won't tolerate anarchy, society will be a better place. The way to indicate that standard is serious is to debilitate offenders.

That is what should have been done in this case. Why was there no tear gas or rubber bullets? Or real bullets?

Anarchy should not be tolerated, and in this case it was well known to be a potentiality many many days in advance. Let's do better as a society.

ABOUT MY REVIEWS:

I do not include a synopsis of the film/show -- you can get that anywhere and that does not constitute a meaningful review -- but rather my thoughts and feelings on the film that hopefully will be informative to you in deciding whether to invest 90-180 minutes of your life on it.

My scale: 1-5 decreasing degrees of "terrible", with 5 being "mediocre" 6- OK. Generally held my interest OR had reasonable cast and/or cinematography, might watch it again 7 - Good. My default rating for a movie I liked enough to watch again, but didn't rise to the upper echelons 8- Very good. Would watch again and recommend to others 9- Outstanding. Would watch over and over; top 10% of my ratings 10 - A classic. (Less than 2% receive this rating). For Lifetime Movies for Chicks (LMFC), drop the above scale by 3 notches. A 6 is excellent and 7 almost unattainable.

This feels like another superficial attempt by this Trainwreck series to only talk to the participants of what happened, without having a deeper dive or actually any experts who were not involved included in this thing to explain how this happened.

It is extremely clear how illiterate the participants are with technology and don't have a good grasp on how tech, social networks or algorithms work, however the showrunners thought it would be best just to blame this as a human behavior problem and not a technology problem, which is how this problem started in the first place: On Facebook.

This whole event was triggered when one user made the mistake of not setting a birthday party invite to private, saw her mistake, then tried to fix it on Facebook's mobile UI but couldn't because of its limitation to edit invites, and then the FB algorithmic took control to maximize reach to as many users as possible and turned this one mistake into a huge riot.

Additionally, Meta would not remove posts which were promoting the fake event, which multiple people and government officials were saying was not a real party and would also cause major safety concerns.

None of this was discussed during the documentary, and there's appears to be no attempt by the show's producers to out to Meta for a comment. Instead, all the blame was shifted to the people involved, and not the tools or platforms they were using.

The documentary was a real disappointment. First of all, I found it completely unnecessary that the people involved didn't speak Dutch. That made it feel unbelievable. I still remember the day very well, and the media played a major role in escalating the situation. All the media were just waiting for riots to break out. That aspect was underrepresented in the documentary.

Merthe's story mostly just caused irritation. She was laughing more than showing any remorse. The same goes for the other people interviewed. All in all, it was not a pleasant documentary to watch. No police officers were interviewed. The residents of Haren were victims, but it was all treated like some kind of joke.

Netflix's Trainwreck documentary series has previously covered festivals that went wrong, such as Woodstock '99 and the Astroworld tragedy. Project X, however, was not an official festival; it was a Facebook event.

It began as a birthday party for a 16-year-old girl, but the Facebook event was set to public. This regrettably enabled other users to send out invites, and thousands were sent. Faced with an unmanageable number of guests, the family cancelled it. However, the idea had already gone viral, and copycat events were quickly created on Facebook, attracting ever more attendees.

It was too late. No sooner had one event page been removed than another popped up. This was in 2012, when Facebook was still a relatively new phenomenon. There appeared to be no mechanism to contact the platform directly, and the local municipal authorities and police didn't appreciate the potential for a viral event to attract huge numbers of people. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of invites were sent out.

I know that part of the Netherlands quite well. When people think of the Netherlands, they often picture Amsterdam's nightlife and party scene. However, much of the country, especially in the north-east, is very rural, with picturesque but sleepy small towns. They are conservative with a small 'c' and, as mentioned in the documentary, places where literally nothing happens.

The documentary draws a direct line from the 2012 American film Project X (about a high-school party that spirals into a destructive riot) to the events in Haren. The copycat Facebook events were explicitly named "Project X Haren," which primed attendees to expect chaos and a wild time.

The police, the mayor, and local authorities were simply not prepared. They took no measures to divert people, such as closing roads, and turned down an eminently sensible offer to host a party in a field just outside the town.

A lot of people turned up. Holland has an excellent railway and road network, and Haren is only a couple of hours from Amsterdam. You can get to most places in the country in under three hours, and the town is also very close to the German border.

Before 2014, the legal age to buy alcohol in the Netherlands was 16. Unfortunately, when you have a large number of young people turning up somewhere wanting to have a good time with nothing provided, it's a recipe for disaster. The police got a bit heavy-handed, and a riot ensued.

Of course, watching the show, you feel sorry for the residents and the young girl's family, but it's hard not to see the darkly comedic side of how a simple Facebook event caused thousands of partygoers to descend on a tiny Dutch town. Fortunately, unlike Astroworld, nobody died, so the programme makers were able to present the documentary with a more light-hearted tone.

They didn't get any comment from Facebook about the event, which is a notable omission. In my opinion, Facebook bears significant responsibility for allowing the event to be repeatedly republished with no apparent way for the family or authorities to get it taken down permanently. When the show finished, I said, "I hope they sent Mark Zuckerberg the bill."

Some entitled Dutch kids shared a Facebook event invite, two loser YouTubers incited aggression in the crowd for profit (they're still proud of that cause they are still losers "it was like being in a videogame" says this 52 year old narcissist), then the kids threw some guardrails around, then some police stopped it. 90% of who they spoke to were doing a lot of superficial uptalk about this willfully moronic 5 hour street-drinking event like it was years long war-time and their golden years of achievement. I've never been less impressed by people talking about something so utterly pointless with so much pride.

I think Merthe is a sweet girl. This was not her fault, perhaps a bit naive. How something like an innocent facebook invitation could get out of hand is truly unbelievable. Therefore, it is a bit of an ok documentary to watch, but otherwise not very interesting. The short-haired man from "Stuk TV" could use some work on his English. That was annoying.

The documentary doesn't add anything about how this could have happened, group behavior, police statements, etc. More time could have been spent on that to make it a bit more interesting. That's a missed opportunity.

PS: In a few reviews, it's said Merthe laughed when she was talking about the rumor she heard of two deaths. Her laughter is clearly one of uncertainty, and right after she falls silent and cries.

I cannot stress enough how much nothing happens in this documentary. Would you like a total recap? Once upon a time a bunch of party kids crowded a single street because they heard about a birthday party on Facebook. That's it. That's the story.

This nothing event (where, at worst, some police showed up and made noise to break-up the crowd) was practically as long as this doc itself. Barely an hour and you learn nothing except: some girl's birthday party went a little viral and then kids showed up making noise.

This is the bottom of the barrel for documentary topics. I mean, truly nothing to glean from any of this. Nothing happened worth remembering. Nothing happened to change anyone's lives. Nothing happened besides the above.

"Trainwreck" is almost becoming an ironic and appropriate title for this very series. They've covered a few interesting topics in their time. This one the most useless.