Waco: American Apocalypse

It is a thorough, balanced, immersive and eerily atmospheric examination of a horrific stand-off in which 86 people, including 25 children, died.

The answers aren’t always clear or what one might expect, but as such documentaries go, the effect is a frequently riveting view of an “American Apocalypse,” then and now.

The interviewees speak fluently and in vivid detail, while never-seen-before footage from the time brings those events sharply into focus.

Waco: American Apocalypse sticks mostly to the nuts and bolts of the Waco siege, making for an effective narrative about an incident that was one of 1993’s top stories.

Through interviews with all parties and never-before-seen footage, he wants to explore the facts, through all the fog of war and vehement disagreement. And he succeeds more often than not.

There’s a bit more narration than explanation in this three-part documentary series, though a deep dive into the personal enriches the storytelling. ... "Waco" suffers from a few missing details. ... At the same time, it features people very close to the subject being very open about what happened, even if, when all is said and done, they don't understand it now any better than they did in 1993.

The first episode concentrates almost entirely on the first raid, virtually recreating it in real time. What it doesn’t do here or in the succeeding episodes is contextualise or dig deeper into events. ... A braver documentary might have wanted to investigate a route from Mount Carmel 1993 to Capitol Hill 2021 but this one is happy to settle for spectacle and survivors’ stories over substance. Which is not to say the survivors’ stories aren’t moving.