Das China-Syndrom

The China Syndrome is a perfectly paced thriller and not slow or boring at all, as some people tend to say. The transitions from one scene to another are great and the tension build up in the film will keep you on the edge of your seat for the entire two hours. Jack Lemmon is great, as always, as the somewhat nervous plant operator and Jane Fonda succeeds again in bringing some real emotions into the story. You can see this film as a political statement of the time, or just as an intelligently made thriller. Either way it is definitely worth watching.

70's Hollywood made so many great contemporary political thrillers like "The Parallax View", "Three Nights Of The Condor", "All The President's Men" to name but three, but this one at the end of the decade I'd somehow missed. Of course everyone will know about the coincidence of the Three Mile Island incident which occurred within days of the film's original release which gave it instant topicality and of course gave it a commercial boost, but subsequent nuclear-related disasters at Chernobyl and Fukishama mean that the movie's relevance doesn't diminish as time goes by.

All of that would be of no matter unless it wasn't a cracking good film which it certainly is. It's superbly cast for one thing not only with a dream-team of Lemmon, Fonda and Douglas in the main roles (all garnered deserved Oscar nominations for their work) but it's also well cast in the supporting roles too. The plot is convincingly believable at almost every stage with only the somewhat contrived melodramatic climax slightly at odds with what had gone before.

The film makes telling points about corporate greed over safety considerations still relevant in every walk of business today, but also confronts the limits of free speech and obviously, the debate on the use of nuclear power as an energy source in today's society, but at a more basic level it's just a top-class thriller which ratchets up the tension throughout.

The acting just couldn't be better, Fonda is convincing as the lightweight "feel-good spot" TV reporter who scents a real story for the first time, Douglas as the rule-bending maverick camera-man desperate to get the story out there and Lemmon in one of his last great roles as the company man whose loyalty is tested by his own conscience when he becomes aware of the cover-ups at the plant.

Sure the fashions and depicted technology to name but two elements are dated as only a film set in the 70's can be, but the message of the movie combined with its entertainment value easily transcends these to deliver a taut, exciting and thought-provoking film which was one of the best of, in my opinion, a great decade for Hollywood movie-making.

Centrally focused on the nuclear power industry, James Bridges's film contains a subtext indicting the news media, particularly television. His story leaves no room to doubt that there is a nexus between the moguls of the two industries which influences the way stories are, first, treated and, secondly, presented.

He may exaggerate to make his point, but he makes it so prominent that its place cannot be overlooked in examining the whole of the film.

Bridges also knows Hitchcock's trick of frustrating the audience with the passage of time. When Kimberly's crew is waiting at a public hearing for Jack to arrive with evidence, the performance of the enviro-protesters with their neat clothes, neat black gags and silent protest is as excruciating as nails scraping a blackboard. The audience is more anxious than the characters for an arrival to put an end to it.

Intelligent drama came out of nowhere in 1979 and soon was on the cover of every newspaper in America (when life imitated the film). A nuclear power plant employee in Southern California is threatened by superiors when he decides to go public with the real story behind an accident at the plant. Ostensibly a stuck valve problem, a piece of film secretly recorded by a TV news-crew shows that it was an accident verging on disastrous proportions--and worse, that safety conditions are being scrubbed to save millions of dollars, a cover-up that endangers everyone's lives. The movie occasionally gets too technical (especially in the last sequence) and could use more human interplay; however, the performances by Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda (as a puff-piece newswoman in the right place at the right time) and Michael Douglas (as a freelance cameraman) are superb. The protester asides are both satirical and entirely accurate, and the news-biz (with its corporate structure and vapid yes-men) is well-realized. *** from ****

As someone who lives a sneeze away from TMI, I can tell you how this movie was received in my area...people were terrified.

The administrators at TMI were hardly forthcoming about the situation. Some of the advice we got now seems laughable; I was in HS at the time, and for our protection, the teachers closed all the windows...wow. My one social studies teacher went to see the movie, and when they got to the part about the meltdown destroying an area the size of PA, he said that people started screaming.

So this movie is pretty surreal for me; it seems that it was only dumb luck that kept the plant from a meltdown. Every now and then I drive past it, and it still seems as sinister as it did then. Watching "The China Syndrome" seemed like watching the local news.