The China Syndrome

Jane Fonda is a lightweight local news anchor sent to film a puff piece about clean, limitless energy at a nuclear power plant with cameraman Michael Douglas. As luck would have it, they witness chaos and confusion in the control room and an emergency shutdown. The rest of the movie involves them trying to discover how close they came to disaster, and the power company’s attempts to cover it up.

Released to excellent reviews March 16, 1979, The China Syndrome had maybe the most terrible / most fortuitous marketing bump imaginable when the the reactor at a nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania went into meltdown on March 28th. Fortunately the accident was contained and there were no casualties, but the one-two punch of the film and TMI set back the development of nuclear power in North America for decades (Chernobyl and Fukushima haven’t helped).

The movie presents a worst-case scenario, but it’s thoroughly researched and all too plausible. It’s also incredibly gripping entertainment. This is a classic Fonda role: a story about an underrated if naive woman learning hard truths about a corrupt and dangerous system and rising to the occasion. Jack Lemmon also does typically strong work as the chief engineer — an advocate for nuclear power — who turns whistleblower.

A terrific thriller. The movie works so well not because of its factual basis, but because of its human content. The performances are so good, so consistently, that The China Syndrome becomes a thriller dealing in personal values. The suspense is generated not only by our fears about what might happen, but by our curiosity about how, in the final showdown, the characters will react.

Roger Ebert

It’s refreshing beyond hyperbole to see such suspense generated not by distortions of human perversion and/or heroism, but by well-portrayed human reactions in a terrible but not exaggerated situation.

Michael Ventura, LA Weekly