Featured Audience Ratings

• AJ V

  
  A fantastic true to life film, with great actors, and intense suspense. I loved this movie and I highly recommend it.

• Stephen M

  
  Jack Lemmon plays a shift supervisor at a nuclear power plant who narrowly averts a core meltdown while being surreptitiously filmed by Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas' visiting TV news crew. When Lemmon's superiors pooh-pooh his reservations about the safety of the plant in… More
  Jack Lemmon plays a shift supervisor at a nuclear power plant who narrowly averts a core meltdown while being surreptitiously filmed by Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas' visiting TV news crew. When Lemmon's superiors pooh-pooh his reservations about the safety of the plant in their haste to get back into production, he turns whistle-blower. <I>The China Syndrome</I>, which with uncanny prescience was released just 12 days before the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, is a hybrid of two of the genres most closely associated with the 1970s, the paranoid conspiracy thriller and the disaster movie. Intelligent, suspenseful and brilliantly acted, especially by Lemmon in one of his great 'straight' roles, my only reservations are that it hasn't aged especially well, and Michael Douglas drives me crazy every time he says the word 'nuclear'. It's not 'nucular', you asshole!

• xGary X

  
  Jane Fonda plays a tenacious reporter whose news crew chances upon an incident at a nuclear power plant that could have led to a meltdown, and goes on to try and uncover the conspiracy of silence concerning the plant's safety. Essentially a disaster movie without the disaster,… More
  Jane Fonda plays a tenacious reporter whose news crew chances upon an incident at a nuclear power plant that could have led to a meltdown, and goes on to try and uncover the conspiracy of silence concerning the plant's safety. Essentially a disaster movie without the disaster, this worthy political thriller's main claim to fame is that the meltdown it predicted actually happened at 3 mile island a few weeks later. The plot follows the usual disaster movie convention of morally courageous hero attempts to alert the public to danger, hampered by the interference of big business who are afraid of the damage to their profits, but it is done in a rather more serious-minded way; there is more science and less histrionics and special effects. This can feel a little dry and sterile however, as a little too much of the drama relies on watching concerned looking men in hard hats looking at pipes and dials but Jack Lemmon is as excellent as always, bringing real human drama and pathos to his role. It drags a little in places, but the powerful climax is worth persevering for.

• Dean M

  
  Taut thriller about an accident at a nuclear power plant, features strong performances and solid direction.

• jay n

  
  Gripping & frightening with a powerhouse cast

• John B

  
  Performances by Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda and particularly Jack Lemmon here are not remembered as well as they should be. Apparently this film was released just before the Three Mile Island disaster. A legitimate warning about the uses of nuclear power.

• alan j

  
  Timley thriller with fine acting by Fonda, Douglas and Lemon...a heavy handed message-oriented flick but is quite entertaining nonetheess

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