Radium Girls

This movie should've been a documentary about an actual historical event, but the writers turned it into a borderline coming-of-age story about a naive girl turned strong, with a little bit of history in it. The lead role's personality is so naive it's insufferable.

The story line is full of filler scenes and is hard to follow, due to the odd cut scenes, bad dialogue, and no visual perspective (the camera stays zoomed in on faces throughout, with very rare zoomed out scenes). The camera often blends different photos in the background to indicate that time went by in the movie... I thought this technique went out of style years ago.

It is extremely disappointing how little actual facts were presented. After seeing the trailer, I was looking forward to the scientific and legal details, since in reality there are plenty. But to be honest there aren't many shown and you could basically infer everything that happens in the movie from the trailer.

I really have no idea why they decided to base the movie's plot about the girl's naivete and feelings rather than detailed facts from multiple characters' perspectives. Really a waste of huge potential.

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

Powerful piece of history but the movie is bland as could be. Skip this and 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.

I must admit that I was expecting much more from the 2018 movie titled "Radium Girls" than what writers Ginny Mohler and Brittany Shaw managed to deliver. Why? Well, because of the subject and topic of the storyline and its importance in real life and the lives of those girls working in the Radium business.

This is indeed a very tragic story, but for some reason directors Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler managed to deliver the storyline and its contents in a somewhat disappointing manner, and I must say that I was left with an overwhelming sensation of "was that really it?". This movie's story holds such a significant tale and importance that it felt that directors Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler just nonchalantly brushed over the topic without delving properly into the contents and putting to the screen the tragedy and the horror of these real life events.

The pacing of the storyline felt, oddly enough, monotonous and never really managed to capture me entirely. Sure, the movie was watchable, but it just felt too shallow and bland, to be bluntly honest.

"Radium Girls" was gifted with a rather good ensemble of actors and actresses, and while they had precious little to work with in terms of a proper script and dialogue, then the actors and actresses did manage to put on good enough performances, enough so to make the movie watchable.

I was disappointed with the contents of this 2018 movie as it came to an end. And as such, I am rating the movie a mediocre five out of ten stars. This was hardly a sufficient manner to shed light upon one of the most ghastly real life horror stories of American industry.