Released in 1979, THE CHINA SYNDROME is a slow burn of a thriller that follows Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda as a T.V. news reporter eager to break out from the ‘feel-good’ stories that she’s been assigned and her roguishly charismatic loose-cannon of a cameraman (Michael Douglas) – as they and nuclear-plant shift-supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) realise that something has gone very wrong at the Ventana nuclear power plant. The script’s written by Mike Grey and T.S. Cook – and a second draft (used here) is available at the excellent Script Hive (https://www.scripthive.com)
Regulatory failure, cosy relationships between business and government, workplace bullying, profiteering, flat-out criminality, and institutional blindness to catastrophic risk, all contribute as things start to slip at the plant and bad decisions accumulate…
… culminating in Jack Godell taking over the nuclear plant control room, where he tries to get word out through an incoherent interview with Kimberley, as the company bosses recklessly order the ‘scramming’ of the reactor in a bid to dislodge him and keep their secrets.
Between second draft and film, the script changed. It’s Kimberly in the room with Godell when he is shot – her camera-man pounding helplessly against the glass window that looks down on the control room. And a few seconds later it’s her that hears him say ‘I can feel it’ as he drowns in his blood in a silent room.
Spindler is Godell’s friend and colleague, who has betrayed him by following orders against his better judgement.
What follows is roughly three minutes (in film time – this moment takes place around 1:51 to 1:54 of the film) of tension that is – in my opinion anyway – even more compelling than the charged moments that got us here (the car chase, the discovery of fraud, the gaslighting, the control-room takeover).
Let’s unpick the how and why:
What’s shown is simple: shaky camera footage of machinery juddering and falling apart, intercut with a dark room and a cacophony of shouting in which most people are unrecognisable – lit not at all or only by the dim light of screens on backup power .
The pace of the intercuts drives some of the tension – but diagetic sound design does a lot of the heavy lifting. The inhuman noise of machinery under pressure, in sharp alternation with the panicked shouts of those in the control room, linked by the relentless, insistent alarm. That’s something I’ll be taking into my writing: the way sound choices can deepen the tension generated by accelerating intercuts.
And Spindler (Wilfrid Brimley) drives it home – silently reckoning with the catastrophic consequences of his actions.
Something structural is going on here too: this scene comes hard on the heels of what seemed like an resolution: the bullets had been fired. The conflict was over – but the fallout’s still to come.
One can imagine versions of this story where Godell dies having heroically saved the day – or where Spindrell coolly steps to the controls, revealing that he cleverly subverted the suits’ instructions – or where the SWAT team discover in the nick of time that they’ve been called on the wrong man.
What we get is far more unsettling. THE CHINA SYNDROME never resolves its tension.
The station rights itself and achieves a stable shutdown – this time – independently of the men flailing about in the control room.
In a post-incident interview where Kimberly Wells pushes Spindrell, he eventually finds the courage to defend his friend. But unlike his smooth-tongued bosses, he’s flustered, angry, and disheveled – just like Godell before him. His calls for an investigation sound more like wishful thinking than a credible demand. As the interview finishes, the monitors switch away to an ad for microwaves – the near miss already relegated to ‘In today’s news…’ for all but those who lived through it.
The tension remains. Nothing has changed.
It’s a bold, smart, choice.
Twelve days after THE CHINA SYNDROME was released, there was a partial nuclear meltdown in Reactor 2 at Three Mile Island. It took until 1993 to complete the cleanup. Reactor 1 was retired in 2019, but is due to be fired up again to power Microsoft data centres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident).