I have a few suggestions.
mxracer19:
Open Water is based on the true story of two scuba divers who boarded a boat on a dive trip, were left behind after the boat miscounted the number of divers aboard, and resultantly died.
Some of these sentences are quite long; condensing them makes it easier to read.
For example:
"
Open Water is based on the true story of two scuba divers on a dive trip who died after being left behind when the boat crew miscounted the number of divers aboard."
It might be a result of the forum formatting but I would start a new paragraph after "This is where problems arise." The first part of your paragraph talks about movie producers misrepresenting the story while the second section is about diving safety. You want to split up these different topics into different paragraphs.
Because one diver in Open Water dies of a shark bite wound and the other drowns herself most likely because she would rather not be attacked, people tend to associate scuba diving in the ocean with danger. If you swim in shark-infested waters, you will be eaten alive. While there are shark attacks involving scuba divers, they make up a small percentage of the entire population. According to the ISAF 1998 Shark Attack Summary, only 15.5% of all people attacked by sharks were divers, whereas 69% were surfers.
There are a few things you might want to change in this paragraph to improve readability. The "most likely because she would rather not be attacked" phrase seems have been dropped into the sentence. If you read it out loud a pause after "herself" is natural. You could put and comma before and after it to indicate that it is a minor, secondary thought attached to the first. Be careful of comma splicing two independent thoughts together, however. The quote directly following that sentence is called a dropped quotation. It has the appearance you directly quoting someone but you do not indicate who nor is there an build up to the quote. You could change this to "A commonly held belief is that if you swim in shark-infested waters you will be eaten alive."
After some time, a pair of divers surface because one woman is having trouble with the pressure on her ears. The man begs to borrow her mask, despite the dive-master on board telling him he cannot go diving without a buddy (his buddy had already gone down in a group of three).
If you're writing an academic paper I suggest you avoid parenthesis unless you're doing the citations. Also consider removing the comma in "mask, despite". Read the sentence out loud. What flows better?
The overall appearance he presents to audiences is that divers are a brash group of people who pay good money to be taken out on a boat, and they will dive no matter what. This is entirely false. Divers do pay on average between $50 and $90 for an off-shore boat trip; however, in the dive industry, dive-masters, as well as boat captains are highly respected. In all cases, the crew of the boat has ultimate say in all matters.
Good use of a semi-colon! Both sides of the semicolon have complete sentences; however, you may want to consider changing the second portion to emphasis the connection between the two. Perhaps change it to "however, in the dive industry, dive-masters, as well as boat captains, have highly valued opinions." In this case you would be compairing monetary value to a valued opinion. Also note the useage of a comma after captain. If you put a comma before it to indicate it is secondary you should put a comma after it so the reader can recognize where it ends.
There is a lot of other good advice in this thread. Good luck!