Review of Erin Brockovich, directed by Steven Soderbergh

In my last semester of graduate school, I need some form of escapism from the constant grind of Korean women’s literature and theory, so I ended up watching a ton of movies on Netflix when I needed a distraction. That meant I was watching movies I honestly would have never watched otherwise.

Something I like to play when I open a random streaming platform is Russian Roulette, but for movies. This means I close my eyes, start pressing random arrows on the remote, and watch whatever movie I land on in the end after opening my eyes.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up watching Erin Brockovich. I had never heard of this movie before now, but suddenly I was committing to watch it for the next two hours.

Here’s my review!

One woman gets tied up in a legal case against a big company involved in a groundwater contamination incident.

This film begins in 1993, when Erin B. recently has been in a traffic accident. Injured, and single mother to multiple children, she decides to sue the doctor who caused the accident she was in. The case looks to be an easy win for her, but Erin’s attitude in the court causes her to lose the case, and her lawyer, Ed, promptly ghosts her.

One day he goes into his office and discovers her there, doing work. She says that she needed a job, and he promised her that the lawsuit would go in her favor. He decides to hire her out of pity for her situation, and the first big role that’s she given to go through is a case against Pacific Gas and Electric.

They want to buy out the home of a woman in California, and Erin decides to give her a visit. Turns out she has several tumors and her husband got Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but this Pacific Gas & Electric is super suspicious. They provide the woman a doctor, and Erin starts having the suspicion that the company is involved with something shady.

So she does her research, and finds out the groundwater in the area is contaminated by PG&E, but they’ve told all of the residents they use a safe version of chromium. Ed fires her because he thinks she’s slacking off, but then he realizes the extent of what she’s just uncovered.

Erin keeps going at it, and visits each of the residents in the area. They start to trust her, and open up about the various medical problems they’ve been faced in the past few years. PG&E provides them all doctors, but they (the citizens) never realized the truth behind all of this. Turns out this becomes a class action suit.

Ed realizes that the company might drag this out, and they decide to try a different approach. They convince all of the plaintiffs to go through binding arbitration, and the next time Erin is in town, a man approaches her about PG&E documents. he recently had a relative, also a PG&E employee, die, but they were given a task of destroying documents.

He never did, and he still has them. One of them has proof the company knew as far back as the 1960s the water was contaminated, and they kept it a secret. This is presented in court, and the judge forces the company to settle for over $330 million.

In the end, Ed gives Erin a huge bonus of $2 million for her work.

Overall Thoughts

I don’t think I would have watched this movie under normal circumstances, and while I’m glad I learned about this real-life case and its impacts, I’m not sure if this is a movie I would watch again.

It’s kind of a standard legal drama with the bend of unethical company exploits innocent people, and this one random unemployed mother discovers the truth behind it all, which is interesting, but didn’t do it for me in the end.

Granted, I’m sure someone else out there enjoyed this film more than I did, which is totally fine! You’re not wrong, and neither am I. Taste is subjective. I’m glad I watched it, though. Very informative.

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