The final (for now) go-round for Netflix’s hit summer docutainment series Trainwreck is more of a light derailment than a cataclysm – not that it didn’t have the potential to be one, mind you. The two-part Trainwreck: Storm Area 51 details how one unassuming dorkus posted a joke event on Facebook and watched it spiral out of control and, next thing you know, the FBI is knocking on his door. This saga is well stocked with annoying bullshit: wannabe YouTubers, conspiracy theories, self-promoters, opportunists, EDM and get-off-my-lawners, just for a start. Consider yourself warned, and I’ll consider myself called a “boomer” by anyone who feels implicated in the previous statement.
The Gist: “We’re about to storm what is one of the most heavily guarded military bases in the world. Why? Because the internet told us to.” The guy who said that, Jebus help us all, is called Reckless Ben. Or maybe that was Rackaracka? Either way, you know what you’re getting into here. Suffice to say, Col. Craddock of the U.S. Air Force didn’t find their horse puckey amusing. Yes, Col. Craddock. Most military-guy name ever. Who wrote this movie, anyway? James Cameron? Anyway: The story begins in Bakersfield, California. Twenty-year-old college student Matty Roberts, a self-described “shitposter” and “loser at a vape kiosk,” was bored one day so he tuned in a Joe Rogan podcast (ugh) in which a conspiracy theorist (ugh) went on about the rumor that the U.S. military has been hiding UFOs and aliens in a secret underground facility at Area 51 in Nevada. You’ve heard that spiel too, no doubt. It’s deeply embedded in neo-American folklore.
Difference is, you don’t have a Facebook page called “Shitposting because I’m in shambles” where you post dank AF memes for your 40 followers, broh. Like Matty, who attempted to entertain himself one lonely night by creating a phony public event page titled Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, proposing that people rush the base and free all the aliens on Sept. 20, 2019. LOL LMFAO, amirite? Of course, Matty woke up the next morning to discover that the post went viral. D’oh. After a few days, 10,000 people had signed up for an event that wasn’t supposed to happen but looked like it might actually happen. Now here’s the THE MORE YOU KNOW part of this story: The U.S. military has the authority to legally fill your soon-to-be corpse with bullets if you trespass on its property. Matty’s joke was spiraling out of control, and his mom advised him (he still lived at home with his mom) to try to staunch the bleeding. So he cooled things off by posting the suggestion that the stormers “Naruto run” at the gates (need a definition of “Naruto run”? Here: go watch some anime, loser!!!111!!1!) so they can outrun the bullets. You will not at all be surprised to learn that posting another dumbass joke did not help the situation whatsoever.
DAY 12: This documentary likes to use big ominous subtitles like this to make the story seem extra-dramatic. And it sorta maybe deserves it, because the event ballooned to hundreds of thousands, and eventually a couple million probable attendees. This is not insignificant, and the various talking heads – Matty, his mom, local law enforcement, federal law enforcement, media people, event promoters, dorks who actually attended the event, a “UFOlogist,” residents of the nearby town of Rachel, Nevada – keep talking about how two or three million people would show up to “free the aliens” when no living human possessing the capability of remedial logic and reasoning would ever honestly believe that that many people would actually show up.
Of course, the national media jumped on the story. Of course, Matty, despite his rad Slayer ‘Reign in Blood’ ballcap, tried to turn the event into an EDM concert. Of course, everyone trying to undisorganize this shitshow – Matty, the owner of a campground in Rachel, a couple of probably sleazy concert promoters – kept doubling down instead of just pulling the plug. Of course, internet discourse blossomed into death threats. Of course, authorities didn’t know how seriously to take it, so they took it very very very seriously just to be safe. And lo the desert fox roamed into the scene and uttered the prophetic words: CHAOS REIGNS.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Didn’t we just get the same story about The Power Of The Internet in Trainwreck: The Real Project X?
Performance Worth Watching: Col. Craddock does not crack a single smile during this doc because it is not a laughing matter.
Memorable Dialogue: My two favorite one-liners:
FBI guy: “The problem in this day and age is, how do you police a joke?”
A Rachel resident with a heavy (Scandinavian maybe?) accent sums up the paltry turnout for the event: “There was a lot of these social medias wannabes interviewing each other.”
Sex and Skin: Brief blurred-out clips and screenshots of alien-themed Pornhub videos.
Our Take: Storm Area 51 spends 100 minutes, roughly double the time of most Trainwreck docs, summing up and recapping this ludicrous saga, and still fails to answer key questions, or offer much in the way of analysis. It’s no secret that, after weeks of what’s-gonna-happen tension, only a couple hundred attention-seekers – or as one talking head puts it, “the nation’s morons” – turned up at Area 51 to make lame videos and, eventually, look and sound ridiculous while being interviewed for a Netflix documentary. This is yet another story of internet hype promising nuclear explosions but yielding nothing more than a couple of dry farts. Did we learn nothing from the disappointing box office grosses of Snakes on a Plane, people? C’mon!
Whether the participants in this disappointingly uncurious documentary learned anything from what happened is anyone’s guess. Does Matty still post stupid memes for cheap LOLs? Dunno. The closest we get is a Vice Media guy self-reflecting – perhaps with regret, perhaps not, it’s hard to tell – on being “a blood-hungry media producer” who chased the hype and was apparently disappointed that Area 51 guards didn’t gun down “Naruto running” dorks in a bloody massacre. Why did Matty and campground owner Connie West insist on going through with some vague idea of an “event” despite all the death threats, warnings from authorities and pressure from the promoters who glommed onto the endeavor? Dunno. Nobody bothers to ask them such a simple, obvious, point-blank question. One can assume Matty and Connie stood to make some money from it, but how and why and how much is never clarified.
The second half of the doc is essentially an essay about the logistics of staging a large-scale event in the middle of the desert, many miles from basic resources like food, water, shelter, fuel and toilets. News flash: It’s rather difficult! There are amusing bits about how Pornhub jumped on as a sponsor, and how major corporate brands contributed to the viral-internet alien content avalanche to promote their gross fast-food roast beef sandwiches and the like. Turns out the media attempting to “cover” the event only added to the hot-air hype. News flash: This didn’t help!
It wraps with brief mentions of lawsuits among various parties – after broken partnerships and defections and whatnot, there were ultimately two alien-themed events with live music, one in the desert and one in Las Vegas – and summations of how much taxpayer money was wasted by local and state police and the U.S. military in preparation for an event that could’ve drawn tens of thousands of people. This is a slightly more colorful version of the Wikipedia summation of what happened, albeit with a level of frustrating imprecision in terms of detailed storytelling. Par for most of the Trainwreck course, Storm Area 51 is flimsy and dissatisfying.
Our Call: This whole thing makes me never want to look at a meme again. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.