I had almost forgotten that this event even happened but I was in high school when it did go down. I remember it was quite the embarrassment for the government at the time and they did all that they could to make it disappear from the public eye as quickly as possible.
This documentary has never before seen footage and a ton of phone calls that took place between authorities and the people that were inside the Waco, Texas complex that resulted in disaster. A lot of mistakes were made and I'd like to say that the police have learned a thing or two about going "all in" on something since then.. but I doubt that is the case.
There are a couple of really great reasons why this is worth watching. For one thing it doesn't really take sides. They use footage of people that are sympathetic of the Branch Davidian folks and they also use footage of government officials that still try to make the claims that they did nothing wrong and it was the Davidians themselves that escalated to violence that resulted in so many dead.
Another aspect of the show that is fantastic and unfortunately something that Netflix doesn't do often enough, is that it is exactly as many episodes long as it needs to be (3) and no more. There was no attempt made to turn this into some 12-hour extravaganza with tons of filler. It is the perfect length and no time is wasted.
If you are younger, you probably don't know anything about this at all and therefore you should watch it because it was a really big deal in 1993. If you are older you should also watch it because there is going to be a ton of stuff that you have never heard or seen before since the media was probably suppressed to a certain degree when this was all going on.
One thing that is really telling is the phone calls that happen between David Koresh and the negotiators. David sounds very reasonable during all of the calls that they feature and he seems more than willing to help to not have any more people die in the standoff. I walked away from it feeling 2 things: One, that Koresh was not a good guy and certainly was up to no good but also that the FBI and the ATF are seriously at fault for this having gone as awry as it did.
They also spend a good amount of time, but not too much time, talking about David's upbringing and how it was truly remarkable that he ended up becoming the leader of the Branch Davidians since he was awkward, shy, and kind of a weird fella in his youth. They tell all that they can about how it is that he became some sort of a master manipulator though because every single person inside the complex was ready to die if he asked them to.
Should I watch it?
I watch a lot of documentaries and I have to say that in the past few years, this one is one of the better ones that I have seen. They also don't really seem to have an agenda here and this is something that I like. They are neither pro-Davidian nor pro-government. They simply present the facts and allow you, the watcher to make your own choice about how you feel about it.
It's emotional and at times enraging to see what happened all that time ago and I think that not only is this very entertaining, but it is also an important learning opportunity for everyone so that things like this can maybe be handled a bit differently in the future.
As far as I can tell this documentary is available on Netflix in all regions
