Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film opens with the "tone and bars" test pattern of a T.V. minicam about to feed a live report to the evening news. Cut to Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda), a local reporter hired for her red hair, good looks, and ability to deliver a snappy, well-timed piece of fluff to end the evening newscast. After doing her usual competent but contentless job, she's told to spend the next day filming a special on energy at a nuclear power plant outside Los Angeles...
After bringing his three stars together in the tense sequence early in the film, director and co-screenwriter James Bridges tells three separate stories for the rest of the film. Godell tries to unscramble the reasons for the near-catastrophe. Wells's boss kills her story, and locks the film in the vault, but she keeps trying--unsuccessfully--to convince him to let her do hard news. Adams, meanwhile, steals the film to figure out what really happened at the plant and get the story out. As in any good thriller, these three stories become increasingly intertwined and finally come...
...FILM'S TITLE, incidentally, comes from nuclear engineers' jargon for the worst of all possible accidents at a nuclear power plant. If the level of the water circulating around the hot reactor core drops far enough that the core is uncovered, the heat of the reaction melts the steel containment vessel. Then the reactor itself sinks through the plant's floor, into the ground and, in theory, "all the way to China." In reality, it hits ground water first, and sends clouds of radioactive steam shooting into the atmosphere, killing or contaminating everything for miles around. Not a pleasant thought...
...China Syndrome is not a disaster film in the style of The Towering Inferno nor Earthquake--it doesn't even rely on ritual seduction scenes to cement the plot. Lemmon and Fonda portray characters who are average people, holding perhaps better-than-average jobs, who act heroically when the circumstances demand it. Fonda is very believable as a success-oriented member of the "Me Generation," at first frustrated far more by her boss's fluffy conception of her than by his cover-up of her nuclear accident story. "I've got a pretty good job, and I fully intend...
...excellent job of portraying Godell's belief in "the system" and its safety. Realizing that higher management executives have tampered with his sacred safety procedures and have perverted the reactor that he, with complete sincerity, says he loves, Lemmon's portrayal of Godell's personal struggle carries the film...