Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle

Jonestown is a surprisingly good miniseries on the People's Temple cult started and ended (through mass suicide and murder) by Jim Jones. Very insightful and really helps to explain what sounds at first like an impossible event in Guyana.

Why was this man not locked up? How many years did he get away with conning and fooling the people, he was a con man and a junkie, the feds should of been on this man case years before they got to the jungle, getting invited to Jimmy Carter's inauguration I think tells its own story of where the country was at, the man should of been locked up.

What do you think of this documentary may vary based on the amount of knowledge you bring to it. I have read a couple of books and seen three or four other documentaries about Jim Jones and his temple, so I feel like I have a certain grasp on the details of the story. This documentary does a nice job laying things out for a beginner. It's based on theJeff Guinness book about the massacre, and Guinness is perhaps the most prominent talking head. His book is very good, and he is a fine Personality, but the film might have benefitted from bringing in other experts as well Obviously, there were very few survivors of the events in Guyana, and many of them are represented here. But there were some side stories I was waiting to hear about (like the Temple lawyers who spent the night hiding in the jungle during the massacre) that weren't touched on. The films politics also feel a bit neutered. Jim Jones was an important part of the liberal political establishment in San Francisco, and helped elect Harvey Milk (who was never mentioned). Similarly, the end of the documentary seems to imply that our current political situation is similar to the fear and paranoia which led to Jonestown. It feels like the filmmakers are calling out President Trump, I don't quite have the guts to say so.

Still, there is a lot of interesting footage here, and the interviews with the survivors are valuable.

This is by far the best documentary on the Jonestown massacre. It was very thorough and relied on interviews of people that were actually there. While other documentaries were also good this one had much more of an air of authenticity. Also it gave very much insight on the reason for the mass suicide. The people interviewed were considered complicit at the time which is probably while they were not used in earlier documentaries. Time has diluted that complicity.

The revolution will be televised. I'm quite a sucker for films about cults, but the remarkable thing is how many of them were caught on film. But the Peoples Temple was the cult-uber-ales, which ended in the murder-suicide of almost a thousand of its members; and even this is mostly on the record, including live action footage taken as Jones's followers shot and killed a U.S. representative. The documentary thus almost makes itself, although it's well put together, with interviews carried out with some survivors of the massacre. None of these now see any good whatsoever in the Temple (unlike some other cults who still retain some support amonst their ex-members); and they explain their past decisions as a mixture of beguilment and coerction. Founder Jim Jones had a certain charisma, albeit a creepy one; but the take home message is that people see what they need to (or, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, "at the end of every long hard day people find some reason to believe"). The scale of the tragedy makes the story compelling; you'd like to think it couldn't happen again, but you'd probably be wrong.