Fire in Paradise (2019) User Reviews

Timely documentary

[gabethurau · 7/10 · 3 November 2019]

The recent fire in California and subsequent blackout is another scary reminder that we cannot grow jaded about the increasingly destructive consequences of climate change.

This short was effective, timely, and just an overall terrifying presentation of what those poor people went through during the Camp Fire. Mad respect to all the fire fighters, first responders, and even the researchers and scientists out there trying to sort this mess out.

Worth a watch

[fishnet_research · 7/10 · 30 May 2022]

Watch this - for the humanity a fire like this touches. It's a well made documentary that sensitively covers the beginning, middle and end of this terrible fire.

Every US citizen should watch this, so they know what to prepare for, as climate change continues.

In Australia, it's our annual reality since 2019/20 summer.

This could be their annual reality too, soon..

Well-done, riveting

[mccabegabe · 8/10 · 28 November 2019]

I watched this short film about the devastating "Camp Fire" in Paradise, CA on Netflix. Some of the footage in this is just amazing. In this day and age with everyone recording things on their cell phones, it amounts to some scary footage of people literally driving through flames as they try to escape to safety. It's terrifying, and it shows exactly how fast a wildfire can get out of control and why we need to enact climate and environmental policies to try to stop this horrible trend in which wildfires are getting worse and worse each year. My heart breaks for the people of Paradise and other people who have had their lives turned upside down by wildfires. This documentary does a good job of painting a picture of that day - how everything went from normal to horrific but in mere minutes.

Good but short

[Calicodreamin · 6/10 · 24 May 2022]

Rarely is the bad thing about a documentary that its too short, but in this case it felt like the story was cut off quite abruptly. A well made doc though, compelling story and relevant interviews.

We escaped this fire

[johnrdowns · 10/10 · 1 November 2019]

November 8, 2018 changed my life, my wife's and my community's. This is not for kids or the faint of heart. This movie tells the fear, second guessing, despair and speed of that day. Personal videos and dash cams are plentiful. Tears and destruction are over whelming. I dare you to finish this movie with a dry eye. You won't. Remember those that were lost. And hug those that survived.

May you find Paradise to be all it's name implies.

John D. Paradise, California 95969

Fails to address the actual cause: Overdevelopment

[random-70778 · 9 November 2019]

At least this is not as bad as the widely debunked frontline which cast around for blame ignoring the science.

The science clearly shows that long term severe drought and major wildfires have been endemic in California history for hundreds of thousands of years. since the last glacial maximum the numbers of fires in California for thousands of years, and before that, before the last glacial period massive drought and endemic wildfires occurred regularly for hundreds of thousands of years.

The only thing making that worse today is the massive over-development of California. Specifically massive development into fire prone areas where soil sample strata show there were regular wildfires all along.

Oh "record setting" damage to property and loss of life? ONLY because of the record setting population and record setting amount of real estate where there once was none.

When Humans Are At The Top Of The Food Chain

[nebohr · 7/10 · 29 September 2021]

What we need to worry about is our own (in)action. When politics is more important than survival of the species is when we need to worry about disasters just as seen in this "documentary". "Survival of the Fittest" is NOT JUST A MEME.

Heartbreaking

[MiniCooper91 · 10/10 · 6 November 2019]

I was tearing up the whole time. It's a heartbreaking point of view from a few victims caught in the horrific "camp fire" fire. There's videos from phones and dash cans and I was on the edge of my seat and tearing up. I definitely recommend watching this.

Interesting first person accounts but with an agenda

[wyellen · 6/10 · 11 December 2022]

These first person accounts were most interesting but the documentary has a subtext that climate change is the reason for so many destructive forest fires in California. Only part of one sentence mentions the real reason for these disasters and that one sentence tries to diminish it. Forest fires are natural and lighting starts them as they are a part of the natural ecosystem. However, in California so called environmentalists have put through laws which allow the build up of dense waste material on the forest floor for years, which in the past nature addressed with natural burning. Due to these forced buildups, when the ignition spark finally comes such fires are supercharged and almost impossible to control. The climate in California is the same climate that weather researchers have recorded for many decades. And, as in the past, there are dry spells and high winds that are natural for the region. A change to a more sensible pragmatic forest management concerning waste buildup on the forest floor, like was in place decades ago, would make forest fires in California manageable again.

Hard to watch but good

[Mommyof4babies · 10/10 · 25 July 2021]

Out of all the documentaries I watched about the fire, this one was my favorite. It was rough listening to the kids stuck on the bus, considering my 5 year old was missing for 9 hours and I had no idea where she was or if she was safe.

Amazingly Presented

[terak-79074 · 10/10 · 2 February 2020]

This was an amazingly done documentary on how quickly devastation can happen. I applaud all survivors and am amazed at all the volunteer efforts. The emergency crews were amazing and I hope to see a second part on the rebuilding of Paradise

Focus is solely on the experience of the fire

[metamorphiczircon · 3/10 · 3 November 2019]

This documentary maintains a tight focus on the terrifying and overwhelming experience of the fire from the perspective of those caught up in it, with a special emphasis on the emotions of Paradise residents. Which is fine if that's all you are looking for in a documentary.

Where it falls horribly flat is that it never conveys what caused the fire or the reasons for why fires have become so prevalent in recent years in California. The October 29 Frontline documentary with the same name "Fire in Paradise" is far superior. The Frontline documentary conveys very well both the horrific experience of the fire as well as discussing other factors like the fire's cause, climate change, and flaws in the emergency response devices and systems.

The Netflix doc is better than the Frontline doc by the same name

[rjcicijr · 8/10 · 5 November 2019]

Frontline's agenda is blame and scapegoating from the first scene . The Wall Street Journal is featured as a source. Netflix's however, is riveting, emotional, horrifying ; especially the school teachers' interviews

Was that a real skeleton?

[chasebarbados · 8/10 · 9 November 2019]

Towards the end of the documentary I saw a skeleton in a car, but it may not have been real. To my knowledge, all cadavers were removed as soon as they were found. Nobody was allowed back into Paradise until everything had been inspected, which took a couple of months. If they were joking about the skeleton being there, it was in very poor taste.

I probably shouldn't have watched this

[DerrrrDerp · 8/10 · 8 February 2024]

But did so in the hope I may learn something. I live in north British Columbia where we have 4 feet of snow on the ground normally this time of year (Feb) right now we have NONE. Not one bit. It's catastrophic. We've had warmer winters in the last 20 years, this sometimes means more snow (flood risk) or less (it's all been really unstable) but not once have we had none. We need the snow pack to keep the ground moist as long as possible. One lightening strike or individual throwing out a cigarette butt and fire will spread quickly in a dry forest.

This doc has first responders mentioning the increase in control resistant fires in the last 10 years in California, which was good. The focus was on the people escaping and those who tried to help them. In this political climate, just mentioning it tho has drawn the ire of reviewers here. Yes, it was a real skeleton w^f people! The interviews seemed in no way scripted what is wrong with people.

Eye-opening

[chloevittur · 8/10 · 25 April 2024]

Fire in Paradise is a devastating recount of a wildfire that bulldozed through the small town of Paradise, California in 2018. In this documentary, individuals who lived through the event share their firsthand experiences of being a teacher in a school bus full of children getting stuck in a sea of traffic on the road to evacuation, a mother camping out in a building surrounded by exploding propane tanks with her kids, or serving as a volunteer firefighter working to save those who were left behind. Footage reveals the horrifying conditions that the people of Paradise had to go through during their escape from the fire and the completely flattened neighborhoods and buildings that many residents will never be able to return to.

This 2018 wildfire, officially known as The Camp Fire, spread in an unusually rapid way, compared to other wildfires, covering 153,335 acres, and killing a total of 85 people in the two weeks that it burned for. The fire ignited due to an old, poorly-maintained electrical transmission. This region of California had been facing a wind storm and a drought at the time that the fire started, and a firefighter interviewed in Fire in Paradise states that the California humidity levels had greatly decreased in recent years. At its' peak, the fire was able to spread at a rate of about 80 football fields a minute, quickly trapping residents of the area and creating mass panic as traffic jams arose on evacuation routes. The neglection of transmission tower conditions is a surprisingly prevalent issue and highly irresponsible, unsustainable, and, as seen in this documentary, dangerous issue with electric companies. Issues like this can create an increased potential for wildfires, risk that has already grown as global climate change causes the temperature to rise and the humidity to drop in many areas. By creating more cautious maintenance standards for gas and electrical companies, we can take away some factors in this problem, but the most change would come from recognizing and taking direct action towards the issue of global warming.

Fire in Paradise was a harrowing portrayal of an event that many people have seen through news broadcasts or articles, but seeing and hearing stories directly from people who experienced it firsthand gave me a visceral reaction. This short documentary had me captivated and in awe throughout each survivor's story as well as the footage from during and after the fire's destruction. From an outside perspective it is impossible to comprehend the fear and devastation that these families and individuals lived through, but I think that this documentary may be as close as one could get. I would recommend this film to everyone and believe that this documentary is very important to watch, as fear is often a necessary force to inspire people to make change.

Average

[divemabini · 5/10 · 8 December 2023]

Not going to comment from either side of the political spectrum on this one. That has been done ad nauseum by now. Any complex event, whether a joyous one or a tragedy, is not a case of Black or White. Right or Wrong. It is always shades of Gray. So, anyone who thinks that the blame for this rests solely on "X" rather than "Y", or "Y" rather than "Z" is purely delusional. And has an agenda.

What I will say, and I have to be critical about this is:

1. This documentary comes off as very amateurish in my eye. Like it was someone's big break, or even done by a bunch of college kids. The cuts and edits are jarring. The endless litany of personal accounts jumping back and forth with no sense of time or impact (except for a tiny little artificial clock) makes it clear they took accounts and artificially generated a timeline from them. And the lack of map graphics with locations showing where the individual accounts are coming from lends me to believe Netflix was just using up end-of-year funds to get this one in the can.

2. Probably more of a personal observation, but, did anyone else feel like a lot of these "interviews" were scripted. These weren't actors, so they should sound like average people. But they came across too smooth in their delivery, and the dialogue was too "generic" and crisp, to be considered natural. It is almost like Netflix interviewed these people, and then told them, "that's fine....but we'd rather have you say it like this instead".

All in all, an average documentary about a horrific incident, that honestly fails to elicit much emotion due to canned dialogue and sophomoric execution.

Mesmerizing video recordings, but nothing beyond that

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 7 November 2019]

"Fire in Paradise" is an American 40-minute documentary shhort film from 2019, so really new still and this one was directed by awards-winning filmmakers Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper. It is far from their firstg collaboration and actually this one here is also an award winner already. The main reason why people are seeing it is probably because it is a Netflix production and there it was seemingly successful enough for traditional television to also pick it up. The title is not too telling, so let me explain briefly what itg is about, actually it is about the big fires in California from 2018 in an area that fittingly is called Paradise, so of course they went with this title. Now you know basically what to expect. We get original footage from the tragedy that killed over 80 people and was the worst fire in the area in about a 100 years. Or I could say in the federal state, but I always feel this takes away significance from it because well there's 50 states and that is a lot and many of them have fires like every few years only. Anyway, lets just say it was a big tragedy that caused billions of dollars damage. I thought the footage I mentioned was really the "highlight" of this documentary. You can feel the air sizzling really. You would want to be anywhere but there. I just wish the interviewers could have been half as good, half as interesting. Honestly, I felt each and every single one of them just recited stuff that was written for them. It did not feel too authentic and as what they told was at least in theory really personal, I don't think it was working out. Be it the children who did not talk like children or the locals or the school teachers who had to evacuate their pupils. At leastg the younger one there felt slightly authentic. But she was pretty much the only one, maybe just a better actress than everybody else. As for the firefighters and policemen, I was kinda glad their narrations semeed very fact-based getting to the core of things, but then these emotional outbursts happened when tears came to their faces and this also felt like bad acting. I don't know, maybe I am too skeptical and critical here, but in terms of the quantity of which did not feel real, it was just too much for me and I felt the only purpose these interviews had were to go full ham and over-the-top in order to get the utmost reaction from those people in the audience who believe everything (which is sadly the majority). I am not doubting the trafedy that happened and I wish it could be undone, as much as everybody in this video, also because of what it did to nature, but the way they handled things with this take on the subject I am not happy about it at all and I am actually glad they did not take the full feature path this time. It already felt a bit repetitive this way. I don't know if this can be a contender at the next Academy Awards, but I hope it will not get the nomination, let alone everything beyond that. Thumbs down.