The China Syndrome, an Oscar-nominated thriller, weirdly arrived in theaters days before the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. The film recently received a new Blu-ray printing in August 2024, complete with a pair of Laurent Bouzereau documentaries.

It was just another day on the job for KXLA reporter Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) and cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas). They were assigned to cover the daily routine at the Ventana Nuclear Power Plant. What nobody expected was an accident with the potential to wipe out Southern California. Richard caught the entire incident on tape. Imagine the ratings that something like this would get! Unfortunately, their TV station refused to broadcast the footage.

With KXLA management refusing to air the footage, Wells and Adams do the next best thing. They ask plant supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) to testify before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing. Seeing as how Foster-Sullivan is planning to build another nuclear power plant, it’s all the more important to alert the NRC. What Wells and Adams didn’t know is that Jack had threatened to go to the NRC. Instead, he makes plans to have the false radiographs be brought before the NRC, blowing the whistle on the facility being a ticking time bomb.

Sadly, there are forces working to prevent them from making the public aware of the problems with the nuclear power plant. Soundman Hector Salas (Daniel Valdez) gets run off the road. Godell is later shot and killed when a SWAT team retakes the control room at the plant. It speaks to how much the powers that be didn’t want the news getting out there.

When it arrived in theaters, The China Syndrome became one of the earliest films–along with Network–to take a behind-the-scenes look at television newsroom. Behind the scenes, director James Bridges insisted on having George Jenkins as the production designer. Jenkins had recently won an Oscar for his work on All the President’s Men. The film may have been low-budget but the decision to go with Jenkins paid off–the art direction was one of the film’s four Oscar nominations. The other three nominations were for Best Actor (Jack Lemmon), Actress (Jane Fonda), and Original Screenplay.

Thanks to visual effects and camera framing, one could really feel like they were within a nuclear power plant while watching The China Syndrome. The film’s cinematographer, James Crabe, didn’t have any kind of signature style when it came to his work. According to the second documentary on the Blu-ray, we learn that Crabe was able to come up with a style during production. Meanwhile, one of the biggest challenges in bringing the film to screen was Jane Fonda’s hair color. As for the freeway chase scene, they were able to utilize a section of the freeway before it opened to the public.

Interestingly, Michael Douglas was asked to shave his beard shortly before The China Syndrome went into production. He ignored the note, which is honestly for the best. His character is a cameraman and so it would kind of make sense for his character to not be clean-shaven.

Imagine arriving in theaters as a completely fictional film and then having to deal with the fallout of the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania. We’ve seen how studios pulled films from their schedule because of a terrorist attack or mass shooting. But here, Columbia Pictures had to actively deal with The China Syndrome playing in theaters at the same time and actually pulled it from some theaters–it only opened in 534 theaters.

What’s most shocking is how the film opened to a backlash from the nuclear power industry. Then-Westinghouse Electric Corp. executive John Taylor said it was “an overall character assassination of an entire industry.” Westinghouse had 38 reactors operating at the time with another 71 in the works. Taylor had more to say: “What hurt me most about this film is that the utility chairman and the plant foreman are portrayed as morally corrupt and insensitive to their responsibilities to society. That view is inaccurate and incredible.”

The China Syndrome is a tense thriller and it also serves as a reminder of how far some people will go to keep a problem from becoming public.

Bonus Features

• The China Syndrome: A Fusion of Talent
• The China Syndrome: Creating a Controversy
• 3 Deleted Scenes
• Theatrical Trailer

DIRECTOR: James Bridges
SCREENWRITERS: Mike Gray & T.S. Cook and James Bridges
CAST: James Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas, Scott Brady, James Hampton, and Peter Donat

Columbia Pictures released The China Syndrome in theaters on March 16, 1979. Grade: 4/5

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