Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy, streaming for those with a Netflix subscription now, is a powerful documentary that hit me hard. I got way more emotional than I thought I would watching it, and while I didn’t think it would actually scare me, it did. I’ve been to thousands of concerts in my life. At one point, I was going to five or six a week. Even before I wrote about music professionally, I loved going to concerts, and over the decades, I’ve seen every kind of show, every kind of artist, and every kind of crowd.
I’ve been in some ugly crowds over the years. From poorly run festivals to sweaty, smoky firetraps that somehow got licenses to operate as music clubs, I’ve definitely felt moments of slight panic over the way a crowd was behaving. On my first night in college, I saw Green Day take to the stage at a free concert in Boston that ended with police in riot gear breaking up crowds in the streets. None of that has ever approached the amount of terror felt by the fans of Travis Scott at the AstroWorld Festival in 2022, and that sickening feeling permeates the whole documentary.
Minutes Into The Doc, My Reaction Was Visceral
2025 Netflix schedule, features some video shot by fans in the middle of the human crush, and the pit I felt in my stomach never receded for the rest of the film. The screams and pleas from the crowd are really hard to watch and listen to. I’ve never seen anything like it.
mad at the concert organizers, as I expected to be, but I was left speechless for the victims. This is one of the documentaries that I cannot recommend enough, but I have to warn anyone who sees it that it will be a very hard watch.