‘Under The Banner Of Heaven’ Review: Andrew Garfield & Daisy Edgar-Jones Star In Dustin Lance Black’s Mormon Detective Thriller
FX/Hulu’s big play for Emmy glory in this incredibly crowded season is an adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s excellent 2003 book “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a historical analysis of the history of Mormonism in this country framed alongside a dissection of a brutal murder case from 1984 in the state of Utah. While the book had the context of the history of the origin of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints and how it got twisted into the mindset of the fundamentalist sect of Mormonism that pushed Ron and Dan Lafferty to commit brutal murder, the show feels at the beginning like it wants badly to be more “True Detective” and less Ken Burns, improving in the third and fourth episodes as it becomes more about a broken community than a specific murder.