How to Blow Up a Pipeline – first-look review

This sum­mer, The Guardian pro­filed the loose col­lec­tive of young activists who, under cov­er of dark­ness, don masks, roam the streets of New York City’s wealth­i­est neigh­bor­hoods, and deflate the tires of SUVs, leav­ing a note on the wind­shield for the own­ers to find the next time they get behind the wheel: ​“Your gas guz­zler kills.”

Direc­tor Daniel Goldhaber’s eco-ter­ror thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline chan­nels the urgent fury, right­eous impa­tience, con­fronta­tion­al atti­tude and prag­mat­ic direct­ness of the ris­ing gen­er­a­tion of cli­mate activists, and opens with a sim­i­lar act of van­dal­ism. Hood up, Xochitl (Ariela Bar­er, who also cowrote the film) stalks the side­walk, the cam­era fol­low­ing her in a slinky track­ing shot set to Gavin Brivik’s puls­ing score, before she kneels down along­side an extend­ed-cab truck and pulls out a blade. (Goldhaber’s film, as evi­denced by its title, is an esca­la­tion. The sub­jects of the Guardian pro­file jammed lentils into tires’ valves, rather than slash­ing them.) The chore­og­ra­phy of this open­ing shot con­scious­ly echoes Bertrand Bonello’s sexy black­pilled teen-ter­ror­ism film Noc­tura­ma, but in con­trast to Nocturama’s polit­i­cal remote­ness and exhil­a­rat­ing nihilism, Goldhaber’s film is in direct dis­course with an up-to-the-minute zeit­geist, and does not take it as a giv­en that the levers of pow­er are too remote for its char­ac­ters to grasp.

The film takes place, pre­dom­i­nant­ly, a few days before Christ­mas, a time of mir­a­cles and con­sump­tion and fam­i­ly stock-tak­ing, some­where in West Texas, where a rain­bow coali­tion of would-be eco­teurs gath­er in an aban­doned desert shack to build, plant, and det­o­nate mul­ti­ple bombs along an oil pipeline. In long shot, the wide-open vis­tas of the Per­mi­an Basin offer a fan­ta­sy of life free from sur­veil­lance-state para­noia, an unspoiled mod­ern fron­tier in iron­ic echo of the con­quered myth­ic West (a lega­cy to which Gold­haber nods in a West­ern-film tableau of his bombers gath­ered around a campfire).

Usu­al­ly, film sus­pense set­pieces hinge on defus­ing a bomb. Here, the oppo­site is rather the case, as the cohort assem­bles their matériel and head D.I.Y. bomb-mak­er Michael (For­rest Good­luck) mut­ters to him­self over recipes cribbed from The Anar­chist Cook­book. The film is quite gran­u­lar about the process of assem­bling blast caps and plac­ing charges, where to blow and how so there isn’t an oil spill, and the cam­era lingers sug­ges­tive­ly on Michael’s crib sheet, which seems to indi­cate spe­cif­ic amounts and ratios of var­i­ous volatile chem­i­cals (in the end-cred­it crawl, ​“Anony­mous” is cred­it­ed as ​“Tech­ni­cal Advi­sor”). In clas­sic heist-movie fash­ion, the out­laws ditch phones, arrange ali­bis, and impro­vise around unex­pect­ed snags in an ellip­ti­cal edit­ing scheme that alter­nate­ly exposits and with­holds key phas­es of the plan.

Mak­ing a fic­tion adap­ta­tion of a work of polit­i­cal the­o­ry by Andreas Malm (that you might want to Google in Incog­ni­to Mode) Gold­haber and edi­tor Daniel Gar­ber uti­lize a flash­back struc­ture to alter­nate between pro­ce­dur­al and rhetor­i­cal modes, as the process-dri­ven thrust of the present tense is inter­rupt­ed by char­ac­ter thumb­nails that zoom out onto the sociopo­lit­i­cal con­text (and also drop hints about who, if any­one, is a Fed). The main char­ac­ters com­prise a col­lage of mod­ern demo­graph­ic arche­types, each with their own skillset and polit­i­cal com­pass. Michael is Indige­nous, and lives in North Dako­ta, where frack­ing flares light up the night sky; Dwayne (Jake Weary) is a dip-spit­ting Don’t Tread On Me good olé boy whose pri­vate prop­er­ty was seized via emi­nent domain to make way for the pipeline; Rowan (Kris­tine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage) are Port­landia crusties, one with a trust fund and one with­out. The char­ac­ter flash­backs, pre­sent­ed one at a time in cliffhang­er cut­aways, touch on dif­fer­ent aspects of the cri­sis: Xochitl’s mother’s death in a heat wave; Theo’s (Sasha Lane) can­cer diag­no­sis, prob­a­bly caused by indus­tri­al pol­lu­tion; the cam­pus meet­ing where Xochitl and Shawn (Mar­cus Scrib­n­er) get a lec­ture about incre­men­tal change. In bed lat­er at night, Shawn doom­scrolls through a mocked-up twit­ter feed; its flu­ent, bleed­ing-edge meme­s­peak, and the way the char­ac­ters argue with each oth­er in half-true, half-frus­trat­ing talk­ing points, are the clear­est reminder that How to Blow Up a Pipeline comes from the direc­tor of 2018’s Cam, which did its own wit­ty sub­cul­tur­al stenog­ra­phy in the form of a sex worker’s chat logs.

Gold­haber has pop­ulist sto­ry­telling instincts, demon­strat­ed here by his use of Gage, espe­cial­ly, as com­ic relief, as well as by the very screen­writer­ly sense of char­ac­ter moti­va­tion and stakes. It seems inevitable, both dra­mat­i­cal­ly and soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, that Theo’s Black girl­friend and reluc­tant cocon­spir­a­tor Alisha (Jayme Law­son), who vol­un­teers with local orga­ni­za­tions and accus­es Theo of tak­ing short­cuts in his activism and risk­ing col­lat­er­al dam­age, be the char­ac­ter most imper­iled over the course of the plot. Giv­ing char­ac­ters like Theo and Xochitl per­son­al involve­ment in the cli­mate cri­sis, in the form of grief and trau­ma, risks being reduc­tive­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal — but is also a use­ful reminder, amid debates about the ethics and effi­ca­cy of ​“peace­ful” vs ​“vio­lent” protests, of the vio­lence that is already done every day by those prof­it­ing from cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change.

A fre­quent com­plaint about the kids deflat­ing SUV tires uptown — or cheer­ing them on on Twit­ter — is that peo­ple per­form­ing rad­i­cal pol­i­tics are over­com­pen­sat­ing for not doing the work in their day-to-day lives. 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.