Radium Girls

Radium girls has strong potential storyline wise, it's historical and mostly unknown. The medical effects on the girls is horrific and the coverup sensational. However, this movie is plagued by bad acting, a low budget, and a meandering story. With so much going on why are there so many filler scenes? The flashes of old time footage were unnecessary and most of the conversations were pointless.

They managed to take a piece of women's history and make it dull. Read the book.

It's 1920's New Jersey. It's the age of wonderous new materials and social justice movements. Bessie (Joey King) and Josephine Cavallo are two of the Radium Girls. They apply glowing radium paint onto watch dials for American Radium. The process requires them licking the brush before applying the paint. Jo gets sick. Their oldest sister Mary is dead. Bessie is told that the Radium is poisoning them.

It's an important historical story. As a movie, it runs into some slow sections and some melodramatic moments. Despite that, it's a compelling story. I do wonder if they could have used the real girls' names and stories. It's almost a hundred years ago. It also needs to set up the scale of the problem. I couldn't tell how many women worked in that industry. The drama is limited, but the melodrama is there. All in all, the historical story is compelling enough to keep this movie interesting enough.

This movie has a good message but it was super boring. I get that this is a historical film, but they could've showed the story from a global scale instead of only focusing on a few characters. As tragic as this story is, I felt little to no emotion for the underdeveloped characters. There was also little scientific evidence revealed, and maybe that's historically accurate, but I just felt like nothing really happened? And I even felt like there wasn't a solution in the end. It was disappointing because I was expecting a more factual storyline with interesting historical details that I didn't know about, but I learned nothing except for the fact that many girls died from unsafe work conditions, which I had already known from the trailer. Instead, I watched a very emotional main character break down from watching her loved ones slowly die.

Such a potentially interesting story wasted on insipid dialog and poor plot development. I love a good looking historical film, but could the makers have devoted a little more time to the details? 50-star American flags, 1940s swing music and 1980s ties and sweaters - - - in 1926? I'm sorry, Bessie could not have spoken Valley Girl in the 20s.

The cutaways to vintage film and newsreel scenes could have been a novel way to establish historical context, but too many of the clips were only weakly related to the subject matter.