American Tragedy

Mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine school shooters, is who this documentary mainly circulates around. She tries to grapple with how her son became the monster that shot up a school. When Columbine happened in 1999, at the time such an incident was unheard of although now it has sadly become so common in occurrence. Sue Klebold attempts to look back at the moments she missed, what she didn't see in Dylan, how she didn't notice the arcinary he was building in their garage. This documentary brings up interesting points about how America should be concentrating on preventative care as a way to curb future mass shooter creations. With so many aspects of physical health, we promote healthy eating and exercise but with school shootings we teach people what to do in the moment when it's already occurring. The documentary pushes for mindfulness which is great and all but we all know that the real problem is how easily youth can gain access to assault type riffles is what is problematic.

I am left feeling lost as to the point of the film. I kept thinking "ok, now they will tell me, as a parent, what to do to prevent it from happening." Realistically, I know they can't tell me what to do, but give me some tools to use to at least send me in the right direction. They did give me #committobrainfit. Unfortunately, the website is not made for cell phone browsers, so I can't even see what it's about.

So much has come out since Columbine that it's unbelievable to me that a 2019 documentary would act like there were "no warning signs."

Dylan was arrested multiple times before the shootings, his friends knew he was acquiring guns, and most importantly, the police knew that both Eric and Dylan were troubled youth.

There was a 2-year paper trail and even an instance where a teacher reported a story Dylan had wrote (about watching a madman shoot up a place) to the school, and the school spoke to him about it and dismissed it.

The tragedy of Columbine isn't that no one saw it coming but that everyone should have seen it coming. Eric documented things in meticulous detail on his public website that police had access to. He talked about physical evidence that they later found (pipe bombs). There was a search warrant made up for his house a few months before the shootings that the police never took to a judge.

They were both known to police, Eric's dad knew he was making bombs, and Dylan had also been in felony trouble to the extent that his room would have been searched by any reasonable parent.

They left blazing signs they were going to hurt someone, and everyone just ignored it.

If you're looking for a documentary about the Columbine Tragedy from Susan Klebold's perspective, this isn't it.

While she is open about certain aspects of her son's life, she is not an open book. I didnt expect anything new or enlightening, but I was interested in hearing her speak about their lives up until April 20. Unfortunately, it felt like the filmmakers used her name & the tragedy to market an 80 minute Public Service Announcement about their ideas on Mental Health.

It was significantly drawn out with a ton of unnecessary and super slow reenactments. While reenactments are fine and a typical part of stories like this, they are generally quick and to the point. That's not the case here and I lost interest less than halfway through. The story itself is interesting and deserves to be told but this missed the mark.