from Decider.com
https://decider.com/2020/12/03/heavens-gate-the-cult-of-cults-hbo-max-review/
‘Heaven’s Gate: The Cult Of Cults’ On HBO Max, A Docuseries About The Origins And End Of A Notorious Cult
On March 26, 1997, the 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were found dead in a house outside San Diego; they had all committed suicide. They were dressed similarly, in black jogging suits and blue Nike running shoes. What was eventually discovered is that they were told by their leader, Marshall Applewhite (aka “Do”) that they should join a spaceship that’s trailing the arriving Hale-Bopp comet. A new docuseries digs deep into the origins of Heaven’s Gate and why it attracted such a long-term, loyal following.
HEAVEN’S GATE: THE CULT OF CULTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “March 19, 1997.” We see a video of an older man who calls himself “Do” talking about how it’s time for the followers of his Heaven’s Gate cult to leave the earth.
The Gist: The first part of Heaven’s Gate: The Cult Of Cults, goes back 22 years, to when Applewhite and his partner Bonnie Nettles (aka “Ti”; the pair were also named “The Two”) began recruiting people into Heaven’s Gate. They portrayed themselves as aliens in human form that were thousands of years old, and they promised that their followers would be able to chemically transform and fly into outer space on an alien ship. Director Clay Tweel talks to sociologists and journalists who studied the cult then and now, but he also talks to a number of former members, who managed to get out before the mass suicide happened in 1997. We also hear from Nettles’ daughter, who got to know Applewhite when he and her mom first met.
At the time that Heaven’s Gate first came to the attention of the media, in 1975, it wasn’t taken all that seriously. A bunch of young people disappeared after going to a conference in an Oregon motel, and then the news started reporting on Ti and Do and the recruiting flyers they put out linking Jesus’ prophecy to the existence of extraterrestrials. Little did people at the time know that Heaven’s Gate would endure for over two decades, but that they’d come to such an end.
The episode discusses how Applewhite met Nettles, a nurse at a psychiatric hospital where he was a patient, and talks about Applewhite’s upbringing as the son of a strict Presbyterian minister. Also, two men who went undercover in the group are interviewed; they wrote a big piece for Psychology Today that found that, unlike other cults, the members of Heaven’s Gate weren’t being brainwashed or manipulated; they simply liked what Ti and Do had to say.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This four-episode series feels like it’s almost a gentler version of the recent NXIVM-related docuseries The Vow and Seduced; Heaven’s Gate came before NXIVM, and it was less coercive and manipulative than any of the more famous cults that have been examined. One thing it had going for it was that it was one of the weirdest ones.
Our Take: For people who remember the ending of Heaven’s Gate, you still only likely have pieces of it in your mind: The Hale-Bopp comet, the black jogging suits and Nikes, and the image of the white-haired weirdo who made video messages explaining their mission. What The Cult Of Cults does very effectively is tell the story of the organization, showing why it attracted members and held onto them for so long.
What Tweel is trying to accomplish with this docuseries is to show that, yes, Heaven’s Gate was a cult, one that resulted in a mass suicide. But it wasn’t like the others we’ve heard about; it was strange and its members believed in its strangeness, but it wasn’t one where people were brainwashed into buying into the program. This isn’t Jonestown or the Manson family; Applewhite’s religion-mixed-with-space-travel message just rang true with the people who followed him until the end.
We’re intrigued by the history of the cult — which Applewhite acknowledges in on extensively-cited video message as “the cult of cults” — after it went underground in 1975, when media coverage got to be too much for The Two and their followers. How did the 1985 death of Nettles, who was generally considered the organization’s real leader — affect Applewhite and the rest of Heaven’s Gate? Why did they “stay on Earth” for so long after Applewhite promised that the ship they were supposed to be on was coming? And what was it about the Hale-Bopp comet’s arrival that finally led Applewhite to tell his followers that the time had finally arrived?
Tweel effectively makes up for the lack of archival footage with animation, but there’s more than enough information from surviving former members to fill in a lot of the blanks, including recordings of meetings and Applewhite’s video messages. The remaining three episodes should move along as swiftly as the first one did, and should be even more interesting.
Sex and Skin: Nothing.
Parting Shot: “It’s the cult of cults! It’s the cult of truth!” Applewhite says in a video message.
Sleeper Star: Robert Balch and David Taylor’s stories of being undercover with Heaven’s Gate in the mid=’70s are fascinating to listen to, especially the complex method of how they met the people that would bring them into the group.
Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing that we could see.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Even though Heaven’s Gate: The Cult Of Cults doesn’t necessarily praise the cult in its title, it does a good job of showing how different from other cults it was.
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