Under the Banner of Heaven has been a long-gestating project for screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who spent years developing it as a feature before expanding it into a seven-part miniseries. It’s easy to imagine that abandoned film version zeroing in on the investigation into the brutal 1984 killing of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter, but Jon Krakauer’s 2003 nonfiction account of the crime dug deeper to explore the often-violent history of Mormonism, and Black’s attempt to include that historical context in his adaptation has left his series feeling distended and unbalanced.
