I have to wonder at the completely opposing reactions this film has garnered here, people seem to either love it or hate it. While I didn't hate it, I have to chime in with a few of the things that they've been talking about. I grew up in the Belmont neighborhood of Lincoln, Nebraska, only a few blocks away from Caril Anne Fugate's house. Understandably my childhood was literally steeped in the mythology of the crimes depicted in this film and as I grew older I began to do my own research about them. I've had extensive conversations with older relatives who were living in Lincoln at the time and read an entire book about the crimes based on contemporary newspaper stories about the events as they happened (Headline: Starkweather by Earl Dyer, much better than the movie, if a little dry).
Firstly, anyone who says that this is an accurate depiction of the events is fooling themselves. There are parts that are accurate but many that are not. The sad part is that the things that are accurate are the kind of things you would learn after doing a Google search. In fact, as I watched this movie I kept telling my husband that I suspected that was the extent of the research done for this film, which is a sad testament to the people that died in these events, the filmmakers couldn't even be bothered with an in depth examination of the crimes. It's not hard to get the dates and body positions of the dead right, what's hard is making a picture that tries for the truth based on a melange of forensic evidence/psychology and police statements. In this case, where Fugate and Starkweather gave such conflicting stories, it could have been so interesting, but instead we have the gimmicky "Devil" character...please!
Now I'll get nit-picky. I will pretty much guarantee you that there is only one shot in this movie actually filmed in Nebraska, and that is the brief beauty shot of the state capitol building. Everything else was clearly in California, my husband and I had that pegged before the Bartlett's even appeared on screen. Where is the snow!? There is a reason we used to call Nebraska winters "Ragnorok". There is also a crepe myrtle in bloom behind the Bartlett house, which I have to say, cracked me up. There are no cacti around Lincoln, and the landscape has _no_ mountains of any type, only rolling prairie and the occasional line of trees as a windbreak. I also enjoy that Lincoln literally seemed like a non-city, with no real shots of streets, traffic, or even any of the houses still exactly like they were in that time period. The southern, stereotypical, hick accents were annoying me before the movie got going. Nebraska has it's own dialect, why ignore that in favor of something so pedestrian? There were other little anachronisms here and there, and other little things that only matter to me; like the fact that there is no Lincoln Gazette (never has been as far as I know), just the Lincoln Star and the Lincoln Journal that covered the events in question.
But who cares about all that junk, right? Well, those things are only a barometer that indicates the general level of production value achieved on this movie. You can literally see the actors working their butts off to turn this load into something worthwhile, and I commend them for that. The two leads accurate portrayal of the couple too vacant to stay out of trouble seemed genuine. In fact, the only thing I liked about this movie is the choice to make Charlie to hopelessly dense, violent and romantic all at once.