Waco: The Rules of Engagement

While documentaries on incompetent & overly aggressive US policing are two a penny, this is still perhaps the ultimate. Openly biased, but a good summary of the legitimate accusations against the government’s actions. Some may go a bit too far, but most still have not been satisfactorily explained today. Overall a bit drier than the more recent Netflix series yet full of detail, including relevant exchanges from the public inquiry (even if sometimes the editing is a little selective here).

While some of the conclusions are flawed, it makes its argument and makes it well.

An interesting if dry and obviously biased alternative presentation to the events at the Mount Carmel compound in Feb-April 1993.The FLIR footage and the two independent experts testimony makes an compelling argument that the Branch Davidians did not set the fires that burnt down the compound.The most damning thing for me was the conclusive proof from the video footage shot that day that when the people were trying to escape the building government agents were firing on them.

I just am not wacko about Waco. I was expecting this documentary to be a little more powerful. Instead I just found it to be dry. I feel like there was so much stuff they could have worked with here such as the backgrounds of the people who lived there and the way the news handled it at the time. Instead I just felt they gave a way to basic story of Koresh and didn't spend enough time focusing on the confusion that took place between the FBI and the people inside during the building.

Makes a strong case. It is more than a little disconcerting, however, to realise, more than twenty years after having first seen this film at the cinema when it was released, that a mere five years later the same filmmaker was apparently releasing a movie attempting to prove that so-called crop circles really are made by aliens (entitled CROP CIRCLES: QUEST FOR TRUTH, 2002).

Only in America. A complete clusterfuck. This is not really documentary film as cinema, but rather it's C-SPAN interspersed with various forms of evidentiary material (interviews, photographs etc.) but put together in a very compelling and no-nonsense way. For the record, I am definitely with the Davidian's on this one, for as we know the American military in all its forms is only ever an inch away from full-on sadism (see the Abu Ghraib incident etc.).

Definitely the most well out together Waco documentary I’ve watched over the last week or so. So many connections to so many things that would have deep impacts on American society

[Distant -90's] I mainly remember the end and the footage that hadn't been on the news at the time.

Some of its more inflammatory (!) claims have since been discredited, but this is certainly a powerful doc.

I thought I was going to get a quasi-trashy, sensationalistic account of the events that led up to the months-long standoff between David Koresh's kooky Branch Davidians and the a cadre of trigger-happy gov't agents. What I got instead was a thorough (understatement!) dissection of how Washington politics and an overzealous group of ATF and FBI agents botched their high-stakes negotiations with the "cultists" and then (supposedly) attempted to cover up their role in the tragedy that followed.

Excellent documentary.