BEFORE: Jane Fonda carries over from "Coming Home" - TCM aired a tribute to her about two weeks ago, I was able to get tonight's film and tomorrow's film added to the chain, since I already had two Fonda films coming up, why not make it four? There is some flexibility in the schedule for just such an occasion. And as an extra bonus, tonight's film rhymes with last night's! Love it when that happens.
THE PLOT: A reporter finds what appears to be a cover-up of safety hazards at a nuclear power plant.
AFTER: I went out last night for drinks and $2 tacos with a bunch of ex-co-workers, and we were all set to swap our usual war stories and reminiscences of working for difficult bosses, when a game of pub trivia broke out. I'm always down for trivia, but this was 5 rounds of questions asked by the world's slowest MC, and he wasn't very fast scoring the answer sheets either, so we all ended up staying at the bar later than we intended. When I got home I still had to watch my movie, but I figured a film about a nuclear (or NUKE-u-lar, as one lead character says throughout the whole film) disaster would sober me up quickly.
I think time has taken its toll on this film, something tells me that as a thriller, this film was much scarier in 1979 than it is today. Largely that's because people didn't understand nuclear energy then (umm, I still don't) or the kind of threat that it posed. It seems like the worst thing that can happen (and I'm paraphrasing here) is that radioactive material can meltdown and somehow drill through the floor, all the way to China. Hey, that actually sounds pretty cool, I might like to see that.
Of course, by now we know that's not how it would work, right? We've had Chernobyl, and that Fukushima meltdown in Japan, and radioactive material went UP, not down. Anyway, if something could melt through the floor and go through the earth, wouldn't gravity stop it somewhere in the middle of the Earth, rather than send it to break ground in China? Because at some point mid-way, it's going UP rather than down...
But let's take it as a given that a meltdown would be BAD, regardless of the exact consequences. Does the film depict the bad thing happening, or almost happening, in a scary way? Well, no. Turns out it's not that scary to show men in a control room TALKING about a potential meltdown, rather than SHOWING the meltdown almost happening. Oh, you want action? How about those men flipping switches, and tapping on meters? Don't forget making frantic phone calls... My point is, this film violates the "Show, don't tell" rule.
Oh, there are plenty of shots of random machinery making a lot of whirring noises, and at a couple of points the camera shakes REALLY bad to let us know that bad things are afoot - bad things that we never see. If this film had been made 20 years later, we'd see SPFX of glowing control rods, and radiation that's somehow visible, and tons of water turning to steam. Stuff that's visually interesting, whereas still shots of whirring machinery and paper coming out of a dot-matrix printer just...isn't.
Besides, I'm not really clear on the exact nature of the "disaster" scene in this film. We're told there's a problem, then we're told that there wasn't (though this could be a bunch of BS from the plant's spokesmen), then the threat of another problem surfaces - though apparently it's not a specific problem, just the general problem that safety records might have been falsified during the plant's construction. Agreed, that seems to present an increased risk of future problems, but as far as I can tell, does not constitute a problem in and of itself.
We had this thing back in the 1970's, it was called the "energy crisis" - there were long lines at gas stations, blackouts such, and people started to wonder how long the world's oil and coal were going to last, and started thinking about nuclear power, and also alternate sources like solar power and wind power. If only people had taken those solutions more seriously at that time, we might be in a better place now. But no, nearly everybody kept using gas and oil because it was easier - you just drive your car down to the station (and wait in a two-hour line) to get more! Maybe if you didn't spend so much time idling in the line for gas, you wouldn't need so much gas...
There's a lot that humans should be ashamed of - what's fresh in my mind right now is slavery and our treatment of war veterans, but obviously that comes from the previous two movies. Here's something else to be ashamed of - we've let a few people in power kill that search for alternate energy, so that they can keep on making money from oil. They've also managed to scuttle development so that we're all convinced that nuclear, solar and wind power are not viable. OK, so nuclear radiation's dangerous, I'll concede that - but every day millions of joules of FREE energy are hitting our planet in the form of sunlight, and the vast majority of that is being wasted, making our cars too hot and making tan people tanner. So maybe solar panels aren't perfect - can't we just make them better? We've always been the country of invention and innovation, why have we just given up on the way we produce energy? There are millions of people who could benefit from cleaner, cheaper energy, and a few hundred who are getting rich from us sticking with oil - now that's shameful.
Also starring Jack Lemmon (last seen in "The Legend of Bagger Vance"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Falling Down"), Wilford Brimley, James Karen, James Hampton, Richard Herd.
RATING: 4 out of 10 color bars
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