Dark Waters

December 5, 20195 min

In a time when, if you blink you could miss a major news story, it is good to have movies to remind you of something you might have missed. The world is filled with people who want to do others harm all for the benefit of their wallets. Most of us take the approach of if it doesn’t affect me, then why worry about it, but that is where most of us go wrong. So many things do affect us, I think though it is just easier to turn your gaze than it is to look at something that you don’t want to see. While a lot of us feel that way, you have people like Robert Bilott, who don’t turn away and instead tries to do something about it.

You could say a lot has been sacrificed to make everyday life easier for us humans. There seems to be a daily new invention that makes living a little bit easier , but seldom do we think of the cost for that convenience. At some point in time DuPont changed the world with the invention of Teflon and ushering in an era where you could cook eggs and they would not stick to your pan among many other things. Little did everyone know that a chemical in that material had some harmful side effects, that is everyone but DuPont. Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) is a corporate lawyer who has spent his career defending companies like DuPont. That changes when a friend of his grandma comes to him about his cattle dying and the reason he believes that is happening. That begins a case that will take over thirteen years to have DuPont admit publicly what they already where saying internally. All of this lead to DuPont admitting guilt in one of the biggest cases of corporate wrong doing in American History.

Hearing stories like this don’t make you feel good about the human race. I mean how can a whole corporation just knowingly do another harm, all for a profit. Stories like this need to be told and doing so through a film can open a lot of eyes to something that should be remembered as not to repeat it. The problem can be in how the narrative is told as you are not just informing, but also entertaining. With Dark Waters, writers Mario Correa, Nathaniel Rich, and Matthew Michael Carnahan do a great job at informing, but lack in the compelling department. The series of events feels slow and often uninspired, which is how I felt about learning chemistry in high school. While the story feels important, the performances don’t convey that and instead have you checking your watch more than moving to the edge of your seat. You want to get into this story, but it just never pulls you in completely and feels like you are watching CSPAN instead of a motion picture. The film is worth your time, but I think you can get more from reading, because when it comes to this movie it feel like too much of a chore to watch it.

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