The Siege at Ruby Ridge on AllMovie

The tragic story of the Ruby Ridge "massacre" has been so thoroughly covered and disseminated by the mainstream press that to add anything here would be pointless. Suffice to say that the two-part TV movie The Siege at Ruby Ridge uses the facts at hand to show how the tragedy occurred, and how but for a multitude of blunders and miscommunications on both sides, it could all have been avoided. Randy Quaid stars as white separatist Randy Weaver, who for ten terrible days in 1992 barricaded himself, his family, and a number of zealous followers in a tiny refuge on a remote Idaho mountaintop, while 200 government agents surrounded Weaver's headquarters with orders to arrest Weaver's group alive -- if possible. The catalyst for the crisis is of course Randy Weaver himself, though his wife Vicki (Laura Dern) is shown to be just as rigid, stubborn, and foolhardy as her husband -- maybe even more so. Ultimately, blood is shed and lives are lost, the result of such gross ineptitude that the ramifications of the tragedy would reverberate for decades to come. Featured in the cast is Laura Dern's real-life mother, Diane Ladd, and, in the small role of the Weaver's daughter, a very young Kirsten Dunst. The Siege at Ruby Ridge first aired over CBS on May 19 and 21, 1996.