Rent The China Syndrome (1979)

Still holds up well despite being 40 years old - The China Syndrome review by AF

Still packs punch.
The plot and acting get over some fairing basic action scenes.
The best scenes involve Jack Lemmon. Corporate greed and politics are slightly overdone, but the human aspects ring true.

Slow Burn, Fast Meltdown - The China Syndrome review by griggs

Nothing explodes for most of The China Syndrome, and I still finished it with white knuckles. James Bridges builds suspense from gauges, readings and paperwork, and a twitching needle does the job of a monster. The opening scare tells us enough to panic and skips the Nuclear Engineering for Beginners lecture.

Jack Lemmon is the core of it. Godell starts as a loyal company man, then finds the plant is unsafe and learns the proper channels exist to contain people like him. Lemmon plays it through anxiety and disbelief. Godell frightens the company because he knows what he’s looking at. The cruel joke is that taking the job seriously makes him the outsider.

Jane Fonda takes Kimberly Wells from patronised lifestyle reporter to someone who grasps what she’s uncovered. By the end, she has to keep doing her job while everything around her comes apart. Michael Douglas brings the heat as Richard Adams, angry early and quick to break the rules.

The last stretch is almost unbearable and keeps the stakes human: one frightened man trying to make somebody listen. Then Wells finishes a tearful live report and the news cuts to an advert for microwave ovens.

Act one takes its time, and a few corporate types are plot furniture. I miss grown-up thrillers like this, though: big stars, a thorny subject, and total confidence that adults will sit through two hours of people arguing about engineering reports.

The reactor threatens a meltdown. Lemmon makes you watch a man come apart.

No Nukes (spoiler) - The China Syndrome review by Steve

This is from a period in the 1970s when environmentalists lobbied against nuclear energy. Now that big oil is the devil, it seems incredibly dated. It makes a fairly comprehensive case, though what is most startling now is how steampunk the technology is! Those combustion chambers and cooling networks look like they were designed to wobble loose... as they inevitably do!

In 1979 this seized the zeitgeist after the near miss at Three Mile Island. Now, the complacency of wealthy corporations by-passing safety measures still resonates, but the message has mostly expired. So this is just another Hollywood thriller... and an endearing memento from the decade when fashion got lost. It looks horrible, including the very austere photography.

Jane Fonda plays an ambitious reporter reluctantly presenting lifestyle fluff on a Los Angeles tv news station... while silently tolerating the ubiquitous sexism. When she interviews the head of publicity at a nuclear power plant, it's clear that in the background something is going very wrong. Jack Lemmon is the loyal company man who threatens to blow the whistle.

He's the main reason to watch; back then he portrayed the careworn, midlife American wage slave better than anyone. Eventually it loses credibility when he takes over operations at gunpoint, but there is an impression of a nation in decline evident in many '70s Hollywood films which feels very much like now. And it's fun to see Wilfred Brimley in the Homer Simpson role!