A documentary about the secretive Moonies organization.
This felt like a very surface level documentary, in terms of the fact it covered a lot of things in not much depth. Not only did it assume at the start of the documentary that you already had a working knowledge of who the Moonies are, but it then presented a scatter shot approach to its topic, jumping back and forth between a lot of different points not spending much time with any of them.
It also doesn’t spend much time with more high profile things related to the Moonies such as the death of the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and brushes over a number of these sort of things. It makes one question whether they may have had more material they were forced to drop, or maybe they originally planned it to be a series but then it got turned into a film. It is hard to say but one thing is for sure, it does not give you much of an in-depth look or understanding into the group.
It also has what I like to call Netflix witness/expert syndrome, wherein a documentary has a lot of talking heads who are just regular people, who had experiences with the Moonies, but doesn’t balance that out by including experts to contextualise things. When a documentary leans more heavily on ‘I was there’ testimony rather than having expert opinions it immediately loses credibility and is also far less engaging.
This feels like it was made for the short attention span having youths who want a mass market somewhat true crime documentary.
Overall, weak and fairly boring.
2/5
Pros.
I’ve seen worse, at least it had decent production values
It has some really interesting threads that it just doesn’t explore.
Cons.
It wastes one or two great witnesses
It is far too surface level
It jumps between too many things
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