How did a music festival turn deadly? Inside Netflix’s Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy

Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy is a recently released documentary on Netflix and has been directed by Yemi Bamiro.

Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy takes an incisive look at the tragic incident that occurred on November 5, 2021, when, during rapper Travis Scott's third Astroworld concert in Houston, mismanagement and lack of proper planning led to members being crushed amidst chaos.

As revealed on Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy, ten people lost their lives in the incident that left twenty-five hospitalized and more than three hundred injured.

Here's everything that you need to know about the Netflix documentary.

Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy chronicles the events that led to the disaster

The Astroworld music festival was held in Houston on November 5, 2021, and LiveNation, the organising authority, had built up huge anticipation surrounding the event as the world had just come out of the COVID-19 pandemic and was looking forward to having a good time. Famous rapper Travis Scott was roped in to perform at the event, which soon drew huge amounts of crowds, as revealed on Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy. Little did the concert goers know then that a supposedly fun night out would soon turn into a death trap and would claim the lives of ten innocent individuals.

The Netflix documentary combines interviews with survivors and crowd management experts, along with footage gathered from individuals who were present at the scene and recorded the unfolding horrors on their cell phones. It also takes into account 911 calls, accounts of the friends and families of the deceased, and provides the audience with a holistic account of the tragedy.

The documentary further pointed out that although in the aftermath of the incident, LiveNation faced a slurry of lawsuits and was called to question for their monopoly of the music industry, the roles of SMG Global and the Houston Fire Department were never investigated in detail and no individual was found to be guilty of criminal negligence.

Among the especially moving passages of the documentary are the cell phone footage recorded by the survivors inside the bullpen wherein the unfortunate deceased were crushed to their deaths as more and more people came to jostle against the barricade holding them back from the stage. As the crowd continued to be crushed, Travis Scott continued the show with remarkable apathy.

Director opens up about Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy

Speaking with Tudum, director Yemi Bamiro reflected on his motivation behind making the Netflix documentary:

"Our desire to tell this story stemmed from a very simple question — how can 10 people die at a music festival and no one knows how or why such a catastrophic tragedy happened? The objective for our film from the very start was to challenge all the misinformation that had become synonymous with Astroworld 2021.”

Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy is available on Netflix.

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Edited by Nimisha