The Long Island Railroad Massacre: 20 Years Later

An excellent and moving documentary let down by a slight change of direction towards the end, when it becomes an anti-NRA polemic. Gun Control is a worthy cause, but so is organ donation, to which the family of one victim have devoted themselves. That could have been given equal airtime But it's not such a "cool" topic. Apart from that, the interviews with these brave, dignified people stood in stark contrast to the ravings of the killer in the courtroom. It was very satisfying to see his parole date of... August 6th, 2309. Too soon, if you ask me.

Interesting documentary but super annoying music which frowns out the narrative at times

It started off very shaky, with a tone I worried was veering towards exploitative, and the re-enactments certainly feeling uncomfortable for merely being included.

But things got a little more respectful and less tacky as things went on, and the re-enactments seemed to vanish at a point, too.

The final third does a good job at dissecting how survivors of a violent mass shooting get on with their lives, while everything about the gunman representing himself in court in the middle third was fascinating. Could have extended that alone into a full movie or even a miniseries, as I really want to know what drives someone like that to believe they can convince 12 people they're innocent without the help of lawyers...

A lot of us were living close to Long Island Railroad tracks, but were not directly effected by the murders, thank God. From a distance, all we could think was that this guy had serious mental illness. And then the absurd courtroom drama which dragged on too long, but only certainly proved that he really did have a serious disconnection from reality.

Problem. It's as if the people responsible for the documentary had no faith in the content of their own work. Because, they somehow felt that mixing a continual mechanical drone on top of the audio, mixing the drone on top of the thoughts of the victims, families, and officials, was necessary. If you haven't seen the documentary yet, the drone doesn't qualify as music. Maybe, to keep the audience engaged? Maybe to assure we'd share in feeling anger by subjecting the audience to the inescapable audio-analog of itching powder? Apparently, they had no confidence in our attention span or something. Maybe they thought that we needed the continual drone to hypnotize us, to keep us from changing the channel. Whatever. Otherwise, they had no faith in their own documentary, and mistakenly felt that "it needed something more."

The good news is that long, unchanging tones are easily removed with DSP -- digital signal processing. Please accept my vote in favor of doing a "remaster" of this important documentary.

This documentary appeared to be really interesting that is until I started watching it. The music/tones play continuously throughout the movie and it completely drowns out the commentary and speaking parts, disappointing to say the least!