Made just a couple of years after the mass suicide-murder at Jonestown Guyana in 1978, "Guyana Tragedy" does a fairly good job of depicting the complicated rise and fall of Jim Jones and The People's Temple.Powers Booth is mesmerizing as he portrays Jones from his younger days as a sincere preacher and civil rights leader until his descent into fraud, adultery,and drug abuse.Veronica Cartwright is fine as Jones' wife Marceline although there is little explanation as to why she stayed married to man like Jim Jones.In the end, she is shown dispensing poison to other residents of Jonestown.One problem that I have with the film is the fairly graphic depiction of the mass-suicide."Guyana Tragedy" would have been better without it.

This is quite the gripping, fascinating, tragic story. Quite good, and for the most part pretty accurate, considering it IS a TV movie rather than a documentary. They did create some fictional characters, and combine several actual people into one character, but otherwise this is a good telling of a very tragic and dark story.The final moments of the movie, depicting the mass suicide/murder, are almost directly taken from an audio recording made by Jim Jones. This recording was made during the final 44 minutes of the Peoples Temple's existence. It is available in several places on the internet. This portion of the film is almost spot on in that regard.To sum up, a documentary this is not. However, it does cover most of the base elements to the People's Temple story.

I read a few reviews of this TV movie which all said that the film dragged on for too long and that it was basically only sensationalistic entertainment. I agree that perhaps, the film goes on a bit too long (2h30 would have been enough...) but I certainly do not think it sensationalize the subject matter. Jim Jones' expansive power trip and slow degradation into mental illness, paranoia and drug abuse are never treated in a voyeuristic manner. The movie takes its time in showing how Jones recruited followers (Brenda Vaccaro's and Brad Dourif's character are stand-outs in that matter) but also in observing an uncanny shift in Jones' perception of reality. It is mind-boggling to see an egalitarian, left-wing and compassionnate preacher become such a destructive and cruel dictator. Perhaps the movie doesn't explore Jones' motivations enough, which can make the whole ordeal a bit superficial at times (may have to do with censorship as well...) But Powers Boothe's mesmerizing performance makes it all come true. I am not familiar with the details of the real Jim Jones' life, but Boothe sure makes the monster he plays believable and real. The movie features many strong scenes, among them the preaching messes of Jones, Jones's meeting with Father Divine (a remarquable James Earl Jones), Congressman Leo Ryan (Ned Beatty)'s visit to the Guyana camp and of course, the suicide scene. It is quite a gloomy spectable to watch and Boothe is quite commanding in those last moments. Madge Sinclair shines in this scene as one of the suddenly sceptic follower, and so do Veronica Cartwright (as Jones' wife) and Brad Dourif, especially when their time comes to drink the murderous potion. The relative calm of the end of this scene, the tasteful direction and the contrasting beauty of the natural surroundings all work in making those images quite impossible to erase from one's mind. A disturbing reflection on human nature and its weaknesses. Worth watching, if only to keep in mind one of the truly horrific events of the 20th century. Not to let it be repeated again. Like, ironically, the inscription in Jim Jones' camp: "Those who do not know the past are bound to repeat it".

The movie revealed a lot of the circumstances of what went on at Jonestown in the late 70s, but in my opinion came short of portraying Jim Jones' eerie charisma and demonic persuasiveness convincingly. Unluckily, it suffered too much from the generic soap-opera-ized ensemble cast syndrome. We don't really get to connect with the characters of Jonestown and their plights because 1) for any reader of Jonestown history, the characters are not actually true-life victims of Jonestown, but composites of victims; and 2) even if the characters were true-life, we don't see enough of any of the characters and their personal stories--including Jim Jones himself--to relate to him all that well.The movie tried earnestly--and too hard--to cram too many artificial composite characters into its framework to condense the personal stories of many into a relatively short and unforgiving miniseries. The tragedy of Jonestown could have taken up volumes of heartbreaking personal stories of the 900 who perished. To give the directors and writers of this miniseries the benefit of the doubt, recapturing the immense horror that was Jonestown was probably an undoable task for a 4-hour miniseries.In her book "Seductive Poison," Deborah Layton gives an accurate (and deeply personal) account of life at Jonestown that totally engrossed me from Page 1. I recommend this book over the miniseries for anyone who wants to know just how destructive Jim Jones' cult was to the many lives he affected (and helped to end).