Under the Banner of Heaven

DB
7 hours ago
3 min read

Faith, fanaticism and fractured families.

Detectives Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham) and Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) investigate a crime scene - from Under the Banner of Heaven

Here's what I've been watching and playing over the last seven days...

MOVIES

I hadn't watched this for years - in fact, since I last saw it, I've got through the prequel trilogy, all seven seasons of The Clone Wars, all four seasons of Rebels, all three seasons of The Bad Batch, both seasons of Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi Rogue One and Solo.

Having so much extra context and build-up for what happens in A New Hope made it feel almost like a brand new film and quite possibly enjoyed it more than I ever have before - a 10/10 movie made even better!

GAMES

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

I've only played a little more of this over the last week, but think my team might be slightly over-powered now and I might end up having to raise the difficulty.

Also currently playing: Batman: Arkham City, Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020)

TV

Under the Banner of Heaven

Series summary: A devout detective's faith is tested as he investigates a brutal murder seemingly connected to an esteemed Utah family's spiral into LDS fundamentalism and their distrust in the government. (IMDb)

Episode 1, “When God Was Love”

Quite a first episode, starting with a horrible crime and revealing a huge, star-studded cast with flashbacks, religion, conspiracies and more.

Only caveat is that I can’t see right now how this can last another five episodes, especially with each episode being just over an hour long – unless there are some crazy twists and turns to come.

Episode 2, “Rightful Place”

Not quite as eventful or interesting as the first episode, but does have a nice slow burn leading up to something of a cliffhanger ending.

Episode 3, “Surrender”

The lightest episode so far, in terms of stuff happening and it has started to feel a bit like things are being dragged out more than they need to in order to justify the runtime of seven hour+ episodes.

Episode 4, “Church and State”

The strongest episode since the first and works well as the pivot to really ratchet up the tension on Andrew Garfield’s Detective Pyre as the show passes the midway point.

Episode 5, “One Mighty and Strong”

Basically Ron’s supervillain origin story, showing how he truly went off the deep end – can’t help but feel that there needed to be a more climactic ending to the episode though.

Episode 6, “Revelation”

For a penultimate episode, this really didn’t feel like one as it feels like there’s very little progression in the overall story here, somewhat confirming to me that this story didn’t need seven episodes.

Episode 7, “Blood Atonement”

While it was enjoyable to see the Lafferty brothers brought to justice at last, it did feel like the series was really running on empty by this point and some plot threads were wrapped a little too neatly for me.

Okay, so I got the number of episodes wrong too in addition to how long each episode was - who makes a limited series of seven episodes though?

This show describes itself as 'true crime', so I'll admit that I looked into what really happened and what I found out cemented what for me was the biggest flaw in the series.

That flaw being Andrew Garfield's character, Detective Jeb Pyre, who is effectively the lead of the show as he investigates the murders, but probing a little too hard into his Mormon faith starts alienating him from his wife and community.

First off, that could've been good if all the problems in his life caused by the case hadn't been undone for no apparent reason in the finale - it's literally the case that once the investigation is over, so are his issues with his faith and the strain with his wife.

This isn't Andrew Garfield's fault, as he is great as the central character for this story, but even he can't overcome what feels like an unnecessary focus on his character and the too-neat ending to his story.

Thus it made sense when I found out that his character is entirely fictional and apparently based on another detective who had to deal with a similar case.

This made me really question why Pyre was made such a central character with a big chunk of screen-time dedicated to his personal life when the fracturing of the Lafferty family - especially Dan, who doesn't feel sane at any point in the story - had more than enough material to go on.

Under the Banner of Heaven is enjoyable, but I don't think it needed over seven hours to tell its story and I would've much preferred Andrew Garfield's role playing a far smaller part, especially if you're just going to give him a happy ending out of nowhere. [7/10]