Jonestown: Paradise Lost

A sick circus show with actors playing upon the dramatization of the memories of facts long gone.

Chilling documentary about Jonestown and its aftermath. A small number of survivors, including Jones' son, are interviewed on screen, and segments based on their memories are reenacted using a large cast of amateur actors. The only problem with this is, the guy playing Jim Jones is not terribly convincing, and only serves to remind us of how effective Powers Boothe was as the notorious cult leader in a network miniseries some years before. Nevertheless, this is powerful stuff. One of the hardest things to watch is the actual mass murder itself. Someone -- the son, I think -- points out this was not a mass suicide but murder plain and simple. Things I hadn't known or forgotten: the children were killed first, members of the congregation who were unable or reluctant to drink the poison were injected with it, some members managed to escape into the woods, and Jones sent a death squad to kill the congressman, reporters and defectors at the air strip. They killed at least five and wounded several more. Decidedly not for the squeamish. And I'm not sure what purpose it serves. If its message is to tell us to beware of cults, you have to figure it's preaching to the choir. If it serves as a catharsis for the survivors, more power to it. It is not at all like one of those cheaply made STVs that focuses on a particular killer like Dahmer or Gacy; it's too well made for that.

By Canadian standards, this is a gem. By virtually any other standards, this is the televisual epitome of BASIC. The dramatic reenactments are laughable, more reminiscent of a cheesy movie of the week than the tragic story it attempts to portray. The guy playing Jim Jones is terrible; apparently his direction was, "Okay, I want you to do this role as though you're doing a play at a nursing home for a group of visually impaired and hearing impaired senior citizens. Oh, and it's an hour past their bedtime so you've got to be able to keep them awake. Trust me. It'll be great."

I do remember the re-enactment of the events that led up to the Jonestown Massacre but I also remembered thinking that the re-enactments were additional with the documentary interviews with the real characters like survivor and defector, Vernon Gosney, concerned relative Sherwin Harris, and the real Stephan Gandhi Jones, Jim and Marceline's only son who survived by playing on the basketball team of Jonestown. While I appreciated the mixture of both documentary and docudrama, they could have used the Powers Boothe performance in the mini-series because Powers gives an amazing performance on screen that is simply unforgettable which is why it's hard to imagine somebody lesser known incapable of delivering the material. The real names of the characters also helped in the case. I am not going to compare movies but I thought this was the history channel's version of Jonestown.