Review: Tapped

Tapped  is a documentary about the bottled water industry.

Tapped starts in a small town in Maine, where natural springs abound and where Poland Springs (owned by Nestle) has been pumping out water.  This opens the story to popular bottled water brands in America, particularly Poland Springs, Dasani, and Aquafina (produced by Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi, respectively).  It talks about a wide range of topics during the film, visiting drought-ridden Mississippi where bottlers still pump water while the state thirsts; a town on the edge of a bottle-making factory, where cancer rates are higher than average, due to a chemical from the factory; interviews with company representatives, who evade and bureaucratize, smiling uncertainly when they don't have an answer; touching on commercialization and advertising of water; travelling to a small island in the Pacific, where the sand is partially comprised of particles of plastic; and back to the small town in Maine, where local activism and rallies encourage the audience to join the cause.

The results are shocking.  Dangerous chemicals found in bottles – and the water contained in them – go unchecked by the FDA, whose hands are tied and which has no teeth to enforce its rules.  Millions of bottles are littered each year, turning our oceans into plastic soup and our beaches into unofficial landfills.  Bottling companies pump water from drying lakes and rivers, or merely filter municipal tap water and bottle it.

There is not a main character or central story.  The documentary is structured more as an investigation than a story, but that does not make it less interesting.  The subject matter itself, and the many smaller anecdotes associated with it, are interesting enough on their own without a central character.  Bottled water is such a part of everyday life that hearing the unpleasant truth about it will rivet viewers to the screen.

One of the strong points of the documentary was the repeated motif of a film reel holding newspaper headlines.  Relevant headlines to whatever the documentary was covering at the moment would occasionally pop up in a film reel, effortlessly gaining credibility through clever use of the text track.

The A-Roll and B-Roll in the documentary were balanced beautifully, with interviews and b-roll playing off each other to complement the narration, which was the backbone of the film.  The narration could have stood by itself as a story, but it would not have been as good without the visuals and the text track.

Tapped is an eye-opening expository documentary that will forever change how you look at bottled water.  75 minutes.  4 stars.