How To Blow Up A Pipeline: A Nervy Eco-Terrorist Thriller
A crew of young environmental activists execute a daring mission to sabotage an oil pipeline.
If you were to take William Friedkin’s white-knuckle thriller Sorcerer, mix it with the explosive climate change focus of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed and the propulsive charge of the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, and add a dash of Chloe Zhao’s naturalistic aesthetic, you’d have the highly combustible chemical compound of Dan Goldhaber’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline. It’s a message film, an awareness film, a call to action film, and a refreshing riff on the heist film that’s rolled into a pretty exceptional and deeply compelling nervy thriller about the evils of oil and the necessity of property damage against those who hold the power in a crooked system.
It’s easy to dismiss it as a leftist fantasy — which make no mistake, it is — but it’s also kinda difficult to deny that this eco-terrorist nail-biter makes a lot of sense — enough to maybe even change some minds. After all, this is America we’re talking about, and the two things it cares about are the material (property) and the monetary. When the peaceful protests and futile lobbying against a corrupt system designed to stay corrupt perpetually lead to dead ends and no change, the destruction of property seems like a sure-fire way to no longer be ignored.
This is essentially what author and activist Andreas Malm argues in his strongly worded manifesto for which the film takes its name, but Goldhaber’s film puts Malm’s concept into thrilling and entertaining practice. Using the book as a foundation, Goldhaber, along with fellow co-writers Jordan Sjol and Ariela Barer (the latter of which also stars in the film), build a compelling narrative around a collective of characters, each from varying backgrounds and representative of different perspectives on the climate crisis. The film’s true genius lies in how it thoughtfully wires Malm’s radical principles to the heist genre and laces its story up with a lot of pathos.
A heist film’s success henges on how well you care about its crew, and How To Blow Up A Pipeline gets you to feel compassion for its myriad characters through its solid writing and passionate performances. We follow a collective of 9 activists as they prepare to blow up a pipeline, and while the film sets up the job’s preparation and leads to its explosive execution, it also takes the necessary time to dive into each character’s backstory, all of whom have a justified reason to be vengeful against Big Oil. The film does a nice job of juggling all its players, giving them each a chance to shine in the spotlight and for the audience to get a firm understanding of who they are, where they come from, and why they feel the way they do without losing too much forward momentum with each flashback.
That said, the film misses an opportunity to complicate its mission a bit more and force our characters to have to improvise to carry out the job, something that they did very little of. In moments wherein a complication arose, it ultimately had very low consequences and didn’t really add to the overall stakes. The film also apes the Safdie brothers style a bit too hard (the score is the biggest connector, but the predominantly tight cinematography and mounting tension and color choices of the titles scream Good Time), which is understandable (they rule) but gives it a derivative presentation.
Less of an instruction manual and more of a wake up call, How To Blow Up A Pipeline makes a pretty strong case for destruction as an action of resistance and revolution, but as its story seeps into the end credits like oil to the topsoil (another Safdie-ism), its final note takes a weird turn that slightly diminishes the urgency of its timely message. It needs a more impactful close that better illustrates how what its characters’ actions influenced others to follow in their footsteps in a meaningful way that evokes mass change. Overall, they’re a lot of good here, with some room for growth and improvement. But so anyways, who wants to blow up a friggin’ pipeline with us?!
Recommendation: If you’re looking for a dose of compelling adrenaline, definitely give this complex and charged-up thriller a watch. It might not completely blow your hair back, but its mighty blast certainly gives you something to think about.
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!