Tapped – Review
It’s been a tough time for the food industry in documentaries this year, and as the films have shown, justly so. Food, Inc. unraveled the food industry in a stunning display of facts and terror. Tapped, the debut film from Stephanie Soechtig, feels like a companion piece in certain ways, but is just as vital and maybe more important. The film examines the bottled water industry with stunning revelations. Water is a necessity of life. Humans can live on water, and water only, far longer than food, but there are these companies that are treating water like a commodity that is their right to be bought and sold. It would be a fair argument to say the water industry is a lot like the oil business. Both are natural resources that are being mined without regard to the Earth and nearby citizens, and then turned around for top dollar.
Who would’ve thought that the water you’re sipping on right now, as you are reading this review, is the cause of so much misery and confusion?
Stephanie Soechtig wisely allows the facts to tell the tale, and trust me the facts are pretty scary in themselves, without anyone trying to spin it. By default, the film has an undercurrent of being green, but it never slaps you with it, but treats it as common sense-because it is. I feel that, again, this a wise decision, because a single scene of plastic bottles and litter floating in a lake is more terrifying than any filmmaker or narrator could muster in fiction. The water business, in global terms, is an 800 billion dollar industry, that thrives without much regulations. The FDA does little, and is often mislead by the corporations. Possibly the most staggering fact is that the business uses near 500 million gallons of oil to create the plastic bottles for the water and to transport it to our supermarkets.
The film is filled with these facts, yet it never feels like a lecture. The film hits past statistics by showing the human element, which shows some people’s pain like an unnecessary nuance to the industry. Companies that are producing this chemical called Bisphenol A to make the plastic bottles for the water, and it’s having a massive negative effect on the people who happen to live nearby these plants, let alone the chemical is a neurotoxin that is leading to neurological disorders. When Soechtig interviewed the FDA about this, they sidestepped the question, and told her that if they knew she was going to ask about Bisphenol A, they wouldn’t have granted the interview to her! Incredible! When a dollar is to be made, our safety dies.
Running 76 minutes, Soechtig allows the facts to be heard, without letting the film stumble over all this information, while also making the film move at an incredible clip. Also, Soechtig isn’t a slave to letting just the facts tell the story, as she’s well versed with her subject and during interviews, she clearly outsmarts the interviewees at their own game. They often have no answers to her questions, making the facts all that more revealing. With an industry aiming to privatize water, Tapped lifts the curtain back to show a slaughterhouse. Something so simple like water, is being re-released to us for top dollar, but in return of that hope that this bottled water is good for us, is essentially killing us one sip at a time. Tapped is one of the most pivotal documentaries made to save our lives.
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For more information, go to Tapped’s official site: here
