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Film / The Cokeville Miracle

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"Too much coincidence to be coincidence."
— Ron Hartley

The Cokeville Miracle is a film based on the real-life Cokeville Elementary School hostage crisis. The story is set against the Framing Device of sheriff Ron Hartley, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, having a crisis of faith and doubting the existence of God. At around the same time, ex-sheriff David Young takes the entire student body of Cokeville Elementary, including Ron's two children, hostage with a homemade bomb. Young's wife Doris eventually sets the bomb off on accident, resulting in the deaths of her and her husband, but everyone else survives, which the community hails as a miracle. Ron's pride and insistence on finding tangible evidence before he will believe that the children were saved by divine intervention prompt him to investigate why all of the hostages managed to escape, and he soon discovers that some of the events of that day defy logical explanation.

The full movie is available for free (with ads) on Youtube.


Tropes:

  • Abusive Parents: Young threatens to shoot his daughter when she drops a few guns she's carrying for him. When she later calls him out and declares that she's not going to help him hold the school hostage, he throws his car keys at her and says that I Have No Son!.
  • Arc Words:
    • "Too much coincidence to be coincidence" — Mostly said by Ron, but a few others echo it when describing all the Contrived Coincidences that allowed their kids to survive the explosion.
    • "The air will burn." — Used by Young and his wife to describe what their bomb is supposed to do, and later by investigators explaining why it didn't work out that way.
  • Children Are Innocent: Young targets an elementary school because he wants to bring the children with him into his "Brave New World," where he can become their leader and teach them his way of thinking.
  • Cloudcuckoolander: Played for drama with Doris, who cheerfully reassures the children as they're being held hostage. She's convinced that her husband is brilliant and refuses to listen to any suggestion that he's wrong or a bad person. It's implied through her early interactions with David that she's a victim of emotional abuse, and this behavior is a Truth in Television example of how this can affect people.
  • Contrived Coincidence: In the aftermath of the bombing, Ron struggles to grasp how many things had to line up just right to allow all of the hostages to survive:
    • The school's fire alarm went off multiple times in the days before the bombing, baffling staff who couldn't find a cause. Thanks to the repeated fire drills, the kids knew what to do when they ended up in a real fire.
    • Even though Young had repeatedly built and tested protptypes of his bomb, several things went wrong with the version he took into the school. The milk jug he used to hold gasoline leaked, wetting down the explosive powder beneath it and preventing it from aerosolizing; several of the wires on the bomb were cut, preventing three of its five blasting caps from detonating; and the force of the explosion was somehow directed straight up rather than out toward the hostages as it was designed to.
    • The gasoline leaking from the bomb filled the air with fumes that made some of the kids sick; the teachers were able to persuade Young to let them open the windows for ventilation, which helped decrease the force of the bomb blast and made it easy for the kids to evacuate quickly. Likewise, Young refused to let the teachers close the classroom door because he wanted access to the bathroom, which provided more ventilation and another quick escape route.
    • The teachers tried to keep Young calm by making a "magic square" out of tape to keep the kids away from Young and the bomb. When the bomb went off, everyone but Doris was far enough away to not be set on fire by it.
    • No one was hit by flying shrapnel, even though shotgun shells were exploding in a crowded room and the walls were badly damaged by the flying debris.
    • The teacher Young shot was struck in exactly the right place to cause only a relatively minor wound; if the bullet had been even slightly off, it would have killed or paralyzed him.
    • Ron himself admits that it was fortunate all of the police officers were out of town that day, as if any of them had been present, they likely would have entered the school to confront Young and set off a chain of Disaster Dominoes leading to the deaths of many of the hostages.
  • Divine Intervention: A major theme of the film. In addition to all the logical, but unlikely, reasons why the bomb blast wasn't as powerful as expected (doors and windows open to vent the blast, leaking gasoline wetting the flammable powder and keeping it from aerosolizing), some aspects of the incident completely defy logical explanation. The film never says outright that the hostages were protected by divine intervention, but this being a Latter-Day Saint movie, it leans heavily on the implication that God used small miracles to arrange events so everyone could make it out:
    • The bomb expert assigned to the case notes that some of the wires on the bomb were cut — not just broken or pulled loose, but looking like they'd been snipped with wire cutters. Because of this, the blasting caps meant to aerosolize flammable powder and create a massive fireball didn't detonate.
    • Likewise, the expert notes that the bomb was designed to explode outward, but it's clear that the brunt of the explosion was directed up through the ceiling. He has no explanation for this.
    • Many of the Contrived Coincidences above derived from gasoline leaking out of the milk jug Young used in his bomb. Ron (who read Young's journals as part of the investigation and had a good idea how he thought) notes that Young was very meticulous and paid close attention to detail when building his bomb — so how did a leaky jug get past him in the first place? And if it didn't, how did it just happen to start leaking?
  • Driven to Suicide: After David’s plan fails, he retreats into the bathroom and shoots himself.
  • Enforced Method Acting: The actor playing David Young was told not to interact with the children, just so their reaction would be real.
  • Everyone Has Standards: After seeing his demonstration, Young's friends assume he's planning to set off fireworks — still illegal, but worlds better than what Young really has in mind. When they find out he's planning to blow up a school, they refuse to be involved and are handcuffed in the back of Young's van. Young's daughter Penny is implied to have misgivings about the plan from the beginning, but she puts her foot down and leaves when her father starts yelling at a kid. The three of them go straight to the authorities.
  • Gaslighting: At one point, Young does this to Doris by pouring a carton of milk down the sink, then berating her for not noticing they're out of milk.
  • Gory Discretion Shot: Zig-zagged. In the aftermath of the explosion, several of the children are shown bleeding and nursing burns, and one brief shot shows Doris screaming and on fire. However, the film avoids more graphic fare like a teacher's gunshot wound (all that's shown is a blood-rimmed hole in his shirt) and Young and Doris's deaths. The former takes place behind a closed door while the camera cuts away from the latter before she dies and never shows her body.
  • Guardian Angel: In the aftermath of the explosion, multiple children report having seen angels, some of whom they identify as deceased family members, in the classroom with the hostages. Jason explains that his angel (his great-grandmother) warned him that the bomb would go off and told him to stand by the windows, while another child talks about how someone led her out of the burning building but then vanished once she was outside. Jason also describes how a ring of angels stood around the bomb and flew up into the ceiling right as it went off, leading some of the adults to speculate that they might have redirected the blast upward and away from the children.
  • Hostage Situation: An elementary school gets taken hostage by a deluded man and his cloudcuckoolander wife. The parents react to the news as well as you'd expect. Especially Ron, who was the only sheriff in town that day and was two hours away from the school, and despite his efforts, he doesn't make it back in time before the bomb sets off.
  • Hypocrite:
    • Doris Young claims to love kids and berates a mother for leaving her daughter in her car, even after the mother points out that she was just dropping off her son at school and expected to be right back out. One of the students lampshades this by asking her if this is her first time threatening little kids.
    • When asked by a student why he only has handguns and a few rifles and not something like an AK-47, David responds, with complete seriousness, that getting one of those would be illegal. It should be noted that at the time, kidnapping was a federal offense with a minimum sentence of 20 years in prison.
  • Improbable Infant Survival: Despite the bomb going off, the fire and thick smoke, and all of the shrapnel flying around, not a single child was killed. It’s implied that Divine Intervention was the cause of this, since the bomb had been previously tested and shown to have enough power to kill everyone in the room. On the day of the bombing, however, several fortunate coincidences reduced its explosive power and several of the kids later recounted glowing figures telling them what to do and redirecting the explosion into the ceiling.
  • Insane Troll Logic: Young claims to have worked out how to die and come back to life in a new world using nothing but a calculator. Everyone but his wife recognizes this as a sign of how unstable and deluded he is.
  • In the Back: Young shoots a teacher who's moving the desk barricade so the kids can escape in this manner. Fortunately, the teacher manages to run outside, where paramedics can give first aid, before collapsing. The ending confirms that the wound was relatively minor and he was able to return to teaching three days later.
  • Irony: Doris tries to cheer the children up by telling them they'll be able to tell the story of what happened to their children and grandchildren. During the credits, a clip plays of a survivor noting that she will tell the story to her children — not to tell them how brilliant the Youngs were, as Doris likely meant, but as an example of God's mercy and the power of prayer.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: Or divinely-guided karma, depending on who one asks. The only people to die in the explosion are David and Doris Young, the hostage-takers. Everyone else survives and makes it out of the building. Even their would-be accomplices aren't charged with any crime, since they refused to take part in the bombing and reported the plan to the authorities at the first opportunity.
  • Mercy Kill: The explosion sets Doris on fire, and she's heard screaming in agony as everyone else frantically tries to get out of the burning classroom. Her husband shoots her to end her suffering.
  • Ripped from the Headlines: It's inspired by the 1986 hostage crisis of Cokeville Elementary School. The children reported seeing angels appearing to tell them to go to the window before the bomb went off.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: Justified, as the film revolves around a lunatic with a bomb. The bomb is even designed to create a huge fireball by aerosolizing and igniting a flammable powder. This is shown when Young tests his bomb in a school bus, filling the entire bus with flames, and again later when he sets off a handful of powder with a lighter for the benefit of his accomplices. The explosion in the classroom is more typical of real-life explosions; there is a fireball, but it quickly goes out and fills the room with smoke rather than flame.
  • Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Young refuses to reveal the details of his plan to his accomplices until they're en route to the school. Before this, all they knew was that Young had come up with a way to make lots of money quickly and assumed he was just planning to set off illegal fireworks. When they find out the truth, they refuse to participate, but Young simply handcuffs them in the back of his van and carries on without them. Then several details of his plan don't work out as intended, which turns out to be a good thing for everyone else.
  • "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The credits include pictures of some of the real-life survivors of the bombing, now grown up and married with children of their own.
  • Would Hurt a Child: David plans to blow up over a hundred kids in order to reincarnate them into his "brave new world." Before that, he threatens to shoot them if they try to escape or if the principal doesn't deliver his ransom demand and return to the room within 15 minutes. His wife Doris sees nothing wrong with this, despite claiming to love kids.

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