A group of Gen Z climate activists embark on a dangerous mission to explode an oil pipeline in this tense American indie. By Yasmin Omar
Global temperatures are rising. Ice caps are melting. Forests are burning. But you know all of that. Planet Earth has been in a state of precipitous decline for years. For all the climate summits and political pledges and UN meetings, concrete change has been minimal. Citizens feel powerless. What can we do beyond recycling our plastics and reducing our energy consumption? It’s the mega conglomerates who are pumping noxious gases into the air and plundering natural resources in the name of corporate greed. Daniel Goldhaber’s lean eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), based on the eponymous non-fiction book, taps into these anxieties in much the same way as its spiritual predecessor Night Moves (2014). It centres on a cohort of environmental activists armed with 600 sticks of dynamite and a dream: they want to ignite a movement.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)
The group are mostly socially engaged Zoomers (Just Stop Oil types with thick kohl, vegan diets and beat-up denim jackets) who are at the end of their tether. They have protested, they have petitioned, they have exhausted the proper channels for resistance. That is until Xochitl (Ariela Barer, also a co-writer) has a brazen and/or brilliant idea: ‘We need to start attacking the things that are killing us. We need to take drastic action. Actual sabotage. Property destruction.’ This ensemble piece assembles a roster of independent cinema’s hottest new stars – from Lukas Gage (Assassination Nation) and Sasha Lane (American Honey) to Kristine Froseth (Sharp Stick) and Forrest Goodluck (The Miseducation of Cameron Post) – to implement a game plan and sabotage a Texas oil pipeline. Each of their characters has a personal connection to the climate crisis, be it the loss of a parent in a freak heatwave or a rare form of leukaemia from growing up near a chemical plant.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)
How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t about them though, not really. It’s much more concerned with mounting the heist than developing its protagonists into credible human beings. (They all have a tendency to speak in soundbites better suited to TikTok than actual conversation.) Set to Gavin Brivik’s nerve-jangling electronic score and shot on grainy 16mm, the film has a restless energy thanks to its roving camera, which is almost constantly moving to observe fizzing conical flasks, bottles glugging out bleach, mounds of powder teetering on knives as the twentysomethings gingerly construct their bombs.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)
These heart-pounding sequences flit between many elements, cutting quickly from pipes to valves to wires to wheels, raising the tension to almost unbearable levels as we anticipate the shuddering detonation. The structure of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, where flashbacks interrupt the action at inopportune times, has the unfortunate side effect of undercutting its own power. Goldhaber stops the film dead in its tracks – sometimes at the very moment an explosion occurs – to drip-feed the characters’ backstories. It begs the question why build pressure with such care, only to loosen the screw and let it all spurt out?
The film has been labelled ‘vital’ by dint of its noble subject matter. It’s hard to argue with that. How to Blow Up a Pipeline speaks truth to power, imploring audiences do something, anything to staunch the alarming rate of environmental degradation. At this stage, it’s not a case of awareness. We know, now we need to act. This film wants to, as it says, ‘fix shit in a system built by oppressors’. An admirable goal.
