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Reviews
Escape from Sobibor (1987)
The Anti-Schinder's List
What really impressed me about this movie and the book upon which it is based is that it is, in many ways, the anti-Schindler's List. Escape from Sobibor does not portray the Jewish people who suffered during the Holocaust as mere victims, although certainly they were victims--more than 6 million of all Europe's Jews died under Hitler's regime. Being Jewish myself, I thought Schindler's List was a beautifully-done movie but thought it did our community a disservice by _not_ showing any of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust--in Oskar Schindler's camp and in Krakow itself were small Jewish resistance and partisan factions.
Despite its superior quality as a film, Schindler's List sadly seemed to reinforce the stereotype of Jews "going to the slaughter like lambs" during the Holocaust; the Jews are largely portrayed as reticent, meek, and helpless in the face of the Nazi terror. In contrast, Escape from Sobibor portrays the Jews as being victims, yes, but also being angry, shocked, and disbelieving that the horrors of the Holocaust were happening at all. The movie does have its flaws--it often plays out like the MOW that it is, and the American and British accents prevalent in the movie shake the suspension of disbelief a bit. But it brilliantly shows the relationships among the Jewish prisoners and their differences in how the Sobibor revolt takes place.
On a side note, an unproduced sequel to Escape from Sobibor was written but canned before it was able to be filmed; I had an opportunity to read this script once and thought the stories were interesting, but Richard Rashke's book does a much better job IMO of telling the prisoners' stories post-World War II. I also had a chance to visit the Sobibor camp (as well as other concentration camps in Poland, including Auschwitz); the experience is memorable and harrowing. Despite the deeply sad experience, visiting Sobibor was well worth the experience, and Escape from Sobibor is well worth the watch.
Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980)
Good for a watch, but annoying in that it had too many composite characters
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).