Jonestown: Paradise Lost (2007)

Good concept, poorly executed.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I 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!

I 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.

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.

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.