This documentary is a re-enactment with the aid of actual footage depicting the final days of Jonestown, the Peoples Temple and Jim Jones. Through government information, eyewitness and survivor accounts, the last week before the mass murder-suicide on November 18, 1978 is recreated. California congressman Leo Ryan(Greg Ellwand)makes a fatal journey into the jungles of Guyana, where Jim Jones and his followers carved out their own piece of paradise...the community of Jonestown. Rick Roberts does his best to play the role of Jones, the ego-maniacal pastor. But he falls way short of Powers Boothe's dead on portrayal years earlier. Boothe actually seem to capture Jone's arrogance and charisma. Roberts had the mannerisms, but fell short on...no pun intended...the spirit. Archival footage and in-depth personal interviews gives a glimpse into the inner workings of the tragic cult and its surreal demise. Paradise was lost when the Peoples Temple "drank the Kool-Aid" and Jones put a bullet in his head.
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michaelRokeefe25 January 2008
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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.
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Sylviastel5 December 2008I 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.
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mattmusko18 October 2020I've seen multiple documentaries about Jonestown and have heard stories from folks that lived through this when I lived in Oakland for a while. This half documentary half reenactment stuck to the story that I've been told before. Cults really scare me and it is so sad that really good people blindly get sucked into them. I hope the US has learned to never send Congressional delegates anywhere without adequate security staff. What gets me is the hypocrisy Jones applied towards Guyana. A bunch of Americans want to create a "utopia" free from US government regulation and the raping of natural resources to live a "clean" life away from economic slavery but in order to do that they decide to buy a bunch of rain forest overseas, mow it completely over, buy a nice plantation home in the Capital to retain said "evil" links to the outside world and when said world wanted to check in to see what was going on they killed themselves and their children. Total hypocrites as far as I'm concerned. If true it was telling that Jones already had documents drawn up for defecting parents to sign to permit their children to stay. Jones always wanted the world to burn and he decided to enlist as many people as he could into his demented death wish so it serves him right to be memorialized as the monster that he truly was.
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dhainline118 November 2015I thought this documentary movie about Jonestown was excellent! However, the guy who played Jim Jones did not have the same charisma, dangerous edge that Powers Boothe had. Other than that, the reenactment of the events leading up to the poisoning was quite good! The girl who played the doomed Liane Harris was so good! She conveyed the emotions of a girl barely out of her teens who wanted to make a difference in the world. Liane was a good girl with a wonderful heart who wanted to do the right thing by her mother and she thought joining the Peoples Temple was a great thing. Sadly, it led to her death, her mother's and 2 younger half-siblings' death as well. I felt bad for her father, Sherman Harris who was just connecting to his daughter before this tragedy. I felt compassion for Vern Gosney because he really thought he was doing the right thing for his small son and this lead to the boy's death. I felt bad for Stephan Jones the bio son of Jim and Marcelline Jones. He really was close to his mom and I don't blame him for not missing his dad because Jim Jones made his followers do themselves in. Stephan was well-informed, intelligent and it's too bad he didn't have a father who was the same way! Good documentary of the tragedy that happened 37 years ago!
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Boogalow4 April 2012I was 18 when these events took place in Guyana. Being in the UK I hadn't been aware of this horrendous series of events leading up to the mass killing of all those people and so many children. Much has been made in earlier reviews of the portrayal of Jones by Rick Roberts but in my opinion I thought Mr Roberts did a great job of portraying Jones in his final three days when, after his leadership was being questioned and his arrogance worn down by drugs and an increasing paranoia, became dangerously and lethally unstable. I'm sure Powers Boothe did a tremendous job in an earlier retelling of this atrocity and perhaps portrayed Jones for a longer period than just the last three days of his life. At the end of all of this though, regardless of who played the roles, is the unimaginable horror of the mass killing of all those people and those trying to get people out of Jonestown; failing in the process, and for that I am saddened and truly sorry. If this retelling serves as a warning of the dangers of cultism (as other reviewers have said) then maybe some good can come out of such a dark and harrowing time.
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mrnerdymcgee15 April 2021By 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."
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ersbel13 February 2019A sick circus show with actors playing upon the dramatization of the memories of facts long gone.