Desastre Total: Festival Astroworld

The documentary is well-produced and emotionally impactful, but it lacks objectivity and balance. It fails to fully investigate systemic responsibility and instead fixates too much on Travis Scott's persona, undermining its own stated conclusions. The editing choices from the ominous music to the lingering shots of distressed fans feel crafted to steer emotion rather than inform. By leaning heavily into aesthetic mood and symbolic blame, Trainwreck misses an opportunity to ask deeper, harder questions about Live Nation, security protocols, city planning, and crowd control. Instead, it subtly nudges viewers toward a singular emotional conclusion, even while claiming neutrality. That disconnect is why it doesn't fully succeed as a documentary.

As "Trainwreck: The AstroWorld Tragedy" (2025 release; 80 min.) opens, it is "November 5, 2021" and Travis Scott headlines Live Nation's AstroWorld festival that he started in 2018. It's the first big event in Houston after COVID, and people are ready to party, and party hard. The venue is massive so what in the world could go wrong? Turns out, plenty... At this point we are 10 minutes into the documentary.

Couple of comments: I remember these events vaguely but had not seen any footage or further analysis of it, until now. This documentary lays it all out in a clear and concise manner, including plenty of interviews with people that were there: festival goers, but also a Live Nation photographer, a professional event planner, and even 2security guards who, believe it or not, were hired the day before the festival started and seemingly without any prior experience in security services. It soon becomes very clear that things are going terribly wrong, with tragic results. Surely someone is going to be held accountable, right? How about Travis Scott, who has a prior record of inciting crowds (we see footage of a prior Lollapalooza show where he incites the crowd to rush the stage, and then, SHOKCER (not), the crowd does exactly that). We see details of the horrendous layout of the site, essentially turning the space into several inescapable death traps. We see texts from Live Nation officials as the concert is starting that they fear the worst, including death. Watching this documentary is not easy and certainly is not a lot of fun. In fact, I felt incensed and angry, as this tragedy did not have to happen, but instead, as one talking head puts it, they "ignored blaring warning signs". For shame.

"Trainwreck: The AstroWorld Tragedy" started airing on Netflix last week. If you wonder how a large music festival botches so much in so little time, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

I have no formal training in how to rate a documentary. I can only give my opinion.

Honestly, I appreciated this one. This event is of significant interest to me because I am from Houston, and remember hearing about this on the news. Travis Scott, in my opinion, brought disgrace to Houston. The fact that he gets to carry on with his life of luxury and others don't is disgusting.

However, while I initially solely blamed Travis Scott, after watching, I have an entirely new perspective. So, learned something, which is why I watch documentaries to begin with.

How Live Nation skirted the blame is beyond me. Perhaps we don't have all of the information? IDK, but those text messages between the producers and sound engineer tell me everything I need to know. I wish I had received my jury summons for that day. They 100% should have been sued for the $750 million dollars, and the people should have won. Maybe things would actually change if they were hit where it hurts- their greed.

This documentary won't bring back the people that were lost, but I'm glad someone was able to share their perspective, so it's definitely worth the watch. I don't know how the people at Live Nation sleep at night...so sad this tragedy could have been avoided.

I just finished watching this documentary, and I must say, I'm both impressed and massively devastated. It's hard to comment on the filmmaking when the subject matter is so reprehensible, but I need to give props to the documentarians for weaving together an emotionally engaging, yet fair and balanced narrative drawn from numerous first-hand accounts. I particularly liked the input from the gentleman working for the company that performed the investigation, calling the concert promoters and artists to task by revealing the many blatant planning and safety transgressions leading to all those pointless deaths. Shame be upon them and their misguided greed. I hope they've learned from their grievous humanitarian error, thus enabling them to put their shame in the rearview.

This documentary was genuinely so hard to watch as they made the entire thing as emotional as possible 😭, it really felt like I couldn't breathe the entire time and really made me feel like I was there in the awful tragedy. It was very well made and was so sad the entire way throughout, it really gave me so much more insight into the incident and definitely made me think so much deeper about it. Live Nation handled it horribly and Travis really could've stopped performing during his time, even though he couldn't "stop the show", he was was the show, and he could've just put the mic down. Also the black and white forehead rub was a terrible apology. R. I. P to all of the lives lost in the incident 🕊.