It’s time for action in the explo­sive first trail­er for How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Last year, the run­away suc­cess sto­ry at a Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val light on head­line-mak­ing deals was How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a polit­i­cal­ly dar­ing, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly uncom­pro­mised, and gra­tu­itous­ly enter­tain­ing thriller that secured a splashy dis­tri­b­u­tion buy from Neon. Those not on site instant­ly start­ed clam­or­ing for a look of their own at the rare film that appeared to be wor­thy of its rep­u­ta­tion as edgy, and after months of radio silence, they’re soon to get it.

Neon has just shared the first trail­er for How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the sopho­more fea­ture from Cam direc­tor Daniel Gold­haber. (Cam’s co-cre­ator Isa Mazzei is cred­it­ed as a pro­duc­er on the lat­est; on Pipeline, Gold­haber shares film-by hon­ors with writer-pro­duc­er-star Ariela Bar­er, co-writer Jor­dan Sjol, and edi­tor Dan Gar­ber, all of whom sat for an inter­view on activist cin­e­ma in our recent All the Beau­ty and the Blood­shed issue). Adapt­ed into a fic­tion nar­ra­tive from Andreas Malm’s con­tro­ver­sy-stir­ring the­o­ry book of the same name, it rais­es some salient points about our col­lec­tive respon­si­bil­i­ty to our plan­et, and the ratio­nales for destruc­tion implied there­in. The time to do some­thing has come.

The tick­ing-clock film tracks the tense plan­ning and hair-trig­ger exe­cu­tion of a plan to safe­ly, eth­i­cal­ly destroy a length of oil trans­port pipe in west Texas, car­ried out by a cross-cul­tur­al coali­tion of alien­at­ed, prin­ci­pled sub­ver­sives each with their own rea­sons to strike back against Big Ener­gy. As they race to car­ry out their mul­ti-front oper­a­tion, flash­backs reveal the ori­gin sto­ries bring­ing them to these extreme mea­sures, join­ing to form a cross-sec­tion of resent­ment for the insti­tu­tions that exploit and cap­i­tal­ize on the suf­fer­ing of pow­er­less individuals.

Lit­tle White Lies’ own Mark Asch had plen­ty of good things to say about the film out of its TIFF pre­mière, prais­ing the way it ​“chan­nels the urgent fury, right­eous impa­tience, con­fronta­tion­al atti­tude and prag­mat­ic direct­ness of the ris­ing gen­er­a­tion of cli­mate activists.” In his review, he wrote: ​“A frankly rous­ing action movie, and an ulti­mate­ly quite ide­al­is­tic polit­i­cal screed, How to Blow Up a Pipeline seems primed to res­onate with view­ers who feel not just pow­er­less to change the sys­tem, but pow­er­less to even mean­ing­ful­ly change their own con­sump­tion pat­terns to live more eth­i­cal­ly. This film won’t change the world, but it’s a roman­tic and hard­ly out­ra­geous con­sid­er­a­tion of what it might mean to real­ly try.”

Hard-wiring the stri­dent intel­lec­tu­al foun­da­tions of La Chi­noise to the ample heist-pic­ture plea­sures of Ocean’s 11, this raised fist of a film has already secured its posi­tion as one of 2023’s major releas­es. That it’s going to play in neigh­bor­hood cine­plex­es feels like a coup unto itself.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline comes to US cin­e­mas on 7 April. A date for the UK is expect­ed to be set for the spring as well.