Review of Jonestown Massacre: As We Watched

Another reviewer criticizes this for not spending enough time on the actual massacre. If a person really needs more footage and reportage of the awful suicide/murder at Jonestown, then maybe this isn't the documentary for you. If instead you want to understand how Jim Jones and so many people wound up in Jonestown dying, then this is a decent short documentary. The story of Jones and Jonestown isn't just a spectacular one-day event of murder and suicide, it was how Jones went from an outsider boy in Indiana with a bent toward fundamental religion, to develop a once-idealilstic but progressively manipulative all-encompassing organization in rural California, on to becoming a controlling, addicted, paranoiac madman who brainwashed mostly poor and downtrodden men, women, and children into killing themselves in a terrible jungle in South America. The whole story isn't just the suicides/murders, it's about how Jones became god-like in his mind and convinced vulnerable people that life as he dictated it was somehow better than they could do on their own. Jonestown wasn't just a place, it was an evolving state of mind. This doc is too short to show it all, but a good place for people new to the subject to start.