What choices are left when the people with power do nothing?
That is the central thinking that drives most of the characters in Daniel Goldhaber’s provocatively titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline, inspired by the non-fiction book by Andreas Malm. It is a thinking not restricted to these characters or even the kind of emphatic activists that they are based on; and in fact gains more traction at least as an idea each time a government or union of powers fails to sufficiently act on the climate emergency -which is all of the time pretty much. Malm’s book, a controversial treatise on the ineffectuality of pacifist protest in regards to climate activism, argues that acts of sabotage and destruction are necessary in the fight for environmental justice. Without perhaps being quite so resolute, this is the stance of the film as well -which draws on the real and personal effects of climate inaction, especially on young people, to present a fictional story of eight frustrated individuals coming together to commit an act eco-terrorism (which the FBI defines as crimes against property) and make a statement.
That very pretense itself will make a lot of people decry or simply be uncomfortable with this film, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a highly necessary one -giving voice, maybe for the first time on such a platform, to the concerns of those who must live through so uncertain an ecological future. Goldhaber is a fairly young director; co-writer, producer, and star Ariela Barer is just twenty-four -and she’s not the only cast member to have extra behind-the-scenes credits. This is a movie made by the generation most impacted by the ongoing climate disaster. There’s something quite powerful in that, and poignant.
Like the book it is based on, How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t exactly an accurate title, as the movie focuses only marginally on the technical side of such an act (though one character did make an instructional video). Its protagonists are seven teenagers from Chicago, Portland, rural North Dakota, and Long Beach, as well as an adult local who fought the government over a pipeline being built across his property. With expository flashbacks for each intermingled throughout, most of the movie follows the intricate carrying out of their sabotage, the dangers and pitfalls of avoiding authorities and covering their tracks, all the while engaging with and reiterating the determination that has driven such an extreme measure.
For its radical viewpoints, this isn’t so radical a movie, as it adheres concisely to the fairly standard heist movie formula. It’s understandable -the movie needs some kind of storyline, as reflecting a more experimental approach a la the book would not render it marketable to those audiences the people behind it are looking to reach. But on that front, it could do to be a little more inventive. The filmmaking is generally nondescript and merely functional, there isn’t a lot of character to the visual presentation or style, and several plot beats to do with the heist’s execution are right out of the Soderbergh playbook, only nowhere as deft. It’s palpable how novice a director Goldhaber is and even how the script is the first for at least two of it’s three writers.
And yet it is the subject of the heist that is compelling, the motivations and the pressure even more so. I like how the movie resisted the urge to put a face to its villain -sure there are a couple obstructing people who come and go, but they have almost nothing to do with the system these kids are fighting against. The adversary is simply that overwhelming faceless fossil fuel industry, and though the movie comes dangerously close to triteness a couple time in its depiction of this, it never lets go of the earnestness of it’s convictions -and how uniquely of this time they are. You will never mistake How to Blow Up a Pipeline for any platitudinous mass-market environmental fable of yesteryear. It’s in-tune with the severity of its theme. It is unmistakably urgent.
This really comes through in the stories of the characters, brief though they may be, and the strength of the performances. There’s passionate activist Xochitl (Barer) and her boyfriend Shawn (Marcus Scribner), frustrated that the local peaceful protests they organize amount to no meaningful change in their highly-polluted corner of southern California. It’s even more of a constant reality to her best friend Theo (Sasha Lane), diagnosed with leukemia directly as a cause of the local air quality. Barer and Lane convey remarkably the desperation inherent to what they choose to do, while Jaime Lawson as Theo’s girlfriend Alisha, recruited out of her love for Theo, does well as the voice of modest dissent -pointing out how this statement is not a victimless crime where it concerns the fallout, as well as the impact such a thing would have on the public perception of environmental activism. Her voicing of these concerns arguably amounts to just lip service by a film that doesn’t share their weight, but it is still worth noting the nuance that the script acknowledges in the conversation around ecologically-motivated violence. Certainly it means little to Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage), a Bonnie and Clyde duo who have already gotten in trouble with the law for acts of sabotage in Portland, and are resigned to being labeled as ‘terrorists’ regardless of what they do.
The best performances of the film though come through the characters who care even less about repercussion: Jake Weary as Dwayne, the working-class farmer with a young child, motivated more out of anger towards the government than any particular environmentalist conviction -his guardedness betraying his psychological shell-shock. And then there’s the furiosity of Forrest Goodluck’s Michael, the team’s actual bomb-maker, whose approach to the whole endeavour is wit’s end, ride or die. It’s no accident that the most extreme participant here is an Indigenous youth, who has clearly spent his whole life watching white government’s encroachment and abuse of the natural world. Michael is the facet for the movie to make its boldest statements and Goodluck is more than up to the task of shouldering that gravity.
Speaking of shouldering, there’s a lot of heavy lifting in this movie. It’s curious to see the methods by which this collective carries out their task, such as strapping a very volatile barrel with the detonative material condensed inside to a strip of open pipeline. Some of the obstacles, like the appearance of a random drone feel contrived, but the drama is drawn with ample pacing –especially in a couple instances where it ties in with a flashback. Like any heist movie, it comes together in the end by revealing a new layer to the plotting, counteracting the more threatening developments. It feels a touch cheaply used here, not only in where it comes in structurally (one character is deprived a backstory for it), but also in that it tempers the movie’s central theme a tad, conceding in consequence a degree of moral ambiguity where the movie had been so steadfast before.
Nevertheless, it is surprising how little the movie’s ethics are compromised –a movie titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline, remember. This is a piece that articulates climate dread, perhaps the most potently since First Reformed. It legitimizes sabotage and violence against property as proactive and necessary; and it does the work to back that message up through a context of anger and desperation. But it is not a movie that sympathizes with eco-terrorism as much as it is a movie that sympathizes with the dour state of the world, and the impact that that has on the young generation forced to inherit it. Each year gets worse, each year we pass a new point of no return for sustainability -and the governments, the conglomerates, the billionaires refuse to act with any meaningful resolve. Against that visceral reality, this movie asks you to consider, is blowing up a pipeline really so extreme?
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