As a fellow Santa Fe alumni I am happy to create the first review here.
The film is structured into three parts. Showing you how the event unfolded, getting to know the victims, friends and families, and finally the politics of what the school and police could have done better with a sprinkle of gun control.
There is much to say but I don't know where to start so I guess I'll talk about the positives.
It was good to see the victims and families side of the story. Their emotions and testimony is the heart of the film and I can't imagine how they feel being a parent myself. I also liked being able to see how it all unfolded even though it was done so poorly with graphics that looks like a poorer version of MS Paint.
Now with the negatives.
I'm not sure what this directors previous films are or was this his first go but it has amateurish all over the board. From the pacing, music, editing, the redundancy of information, the manipulative and borderline rude questions he asks during his interviews. There is no narration and we have just the basic title card and text giving us a timeline of what happened. Its ok at first but as it continues you feel a more polished design and narration would benefit the movie greatly.
THE MUSIC WAS EAR GRATINGLY TERRIBLE!
It's like he doesn't know when to turn of the ambient xylophone noise he calls background music off. So it just continues through important dialogue with the interviews and just doesn't stop and it becomes very distracting and it got very annoying to sit through. The editing choices were very poor as well. Like he was just trying to rush it out of post production. Cuts will happen in the middle of dialogue and it becomes very distracting, shots also stay longer than needed. The director keeps bringing things up that were already mentioned 30 minutes after they were said. So it starts feeling redundant or just poorly edited. There are many of the same shots in this film from text to the same scenes of the high school you will see many times. So it make the overall flow of this documentary feel like a jumbled mess. Most of the film is filled with interviews of the victims, family members and people of interest from the shooting. He asks some questions that seem very manipulative to his vision of the film and some rude ones like "what would you have done different?" Which doesn't seem too harmful till you see it. Also he interviews a autopsy tech that had to see the bodies and its one of the most uncomfortable scenes in the film, she has a smile throughout and its really off putting.
All that being said I feel the biggest missed opportunity was not showing the community before and after. I've lived here most of my life and I know like many who live here there is a great sense of being there for each other, it is a religious town so much so that it had to take it's case for having prayers over the pa system at football games go all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. Everyone knows everyone here. Its a great community and if he would have just added a little bit of that it would have been so much better.
Overall though, the victims and the community deserves a better film than this. Im not sure if the directors heart was in the right place, but the interviews with the families and getting to know the victims were good to hear there testimony. However, how its presented. I really can't recommend this. There are much more competently directed documentaries out there and this ain't one of them.
