Delayed Reaction: Paradise Lost 2: Revelations

The Pitch: Let's wallow in the West Memphis 3's misfortune.

This is easily the weakest of the three Paradise Lost films. It seems to exist only because the filmmakers were surprised by how much the story had caught on with civil rights activists. That, and John Mark Byers is such a character that they had to check in on him. There isn't much traction on the West Memphis 3's appeals at the time. They become secondary. The first film at least gave the appearance of neutrality on the issue. Revelations is fully on the side of the WM3. The directors do everything they can to point out that what we saw in the first movie really was as bad as it looked. I guarantee I would've met the first film with some amount of skepticism in 1996. I've seen too many stories edit around the facts to make things appear a certain way to be fully convinced. Revelations wants to make it clear how weak the case was that put innocent young men behind bars.

I wasn't a big fan of the John Mark Byers witch hunt. He's a rather insufferable person. The filmmakers were all too happy to give him as much screen time as he wanted and all the rope to hang himself. In order to underline how innocent the WM3 were, they painted Byers as poorly as they could. As they point out in the third documentary, Revelations does exactly to Byers what the town did to the WM3: they villainized him and targeted him because he's weird. To be fair, it's a compelling case. Byers is a great mix of crafty and dim.

Revelations is still a thoroughly engaging 2 hours, but if someone didn't want to commit the full 6+ hours to the series that I did, this is the installment I would skip. Much of it is made redundant or meaningless by the final chapter.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend