How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Thriller endorses ecoterrorism, but doesn't require audiences to do so.
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The title “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (opening at Indianapolis-area locations AMC Indianapolis 17, Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie and Landmark Keystone Art Cinema on Friday, April 14) certainly grabbed my attention. The film – inspired by Andreas Malm’s 2021 nonfiction book of the same name – is a disturbingly inspirational and instructive call to arms for ecoterrorism.
We enter the plot in medias res as a disparate group of young adults are plotting to bomb a West Texas oil pipeline. Xochitl (co-screenwriter and producer Ariela Barer) is a Chicago-based college student who came up in the heavily polluted area of Long Beach, Calif. These toxins killed Xochitl’s mother and have riddled her childhood best friend/surrogate sister Theo (Sasha Lane) with leukemia.
They recruit Xochitl’s altruistic classmate Shawn (Marcus Scribner) and Theo’s hesitant girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson) to join their cause. Further induction is done via the Internet. Michael (Forrest Goodluck) is a Native American from the Dakotas who’s clashed with oil workers and has bomb-making know-how. Portland, Ore.-based activist couple Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage) and rightfully disgruntled/wrongly displaced Texan landowner Dwayne (Jake Weary) are also brought into the fold.
“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is director Daniel Goldhaber’s sophomore feature after 2018’s “Cam.” The script by Goldhaber, his “Cam” collaborator Jordan Sjol and Barer bounces back and forth between the circumstances that activated the group’s members, preparation for their attack, the bombing itself (I won’t specify whether it’s successful or not) and the aftermath of their actions.
The movie is very much a modernized take on the counterculture films that proliferated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Cinematographer Tehillah De Castro shoots in a vérité style, which ratchets up the tension in conjunction with Goldhaber’s matter-of-fact editing. Imagine John Hughes’ “The Breakfast Club” by way of Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean 11” only the latter filmmaker is essaying stylistic tics he employed in works such as “Bubble” and “Contagion” and you’ll get a good idea of what Goldhaber’s going for here.
The young cast’s performances are uniformly solid, but I didn’t really like or feel like I got to know any of their characters … even if I understood why they were doing what they were doing. Here action is character. Go figure – as an old-ish white dude I most related/responded to Weary’s Dwayne … the group’s senior member. In spite of this, I was increasingly concerned with everyone’s well-being throughout their process.
There’s a scene in which the group gathers around a campfire to drink and drug. They question whether they’ll be considered terrorists and compare themselves to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who himself was ignorantly seen as a terrorist in his time. They’re unequivocally terrorists … even if they’re doing the wrong thing for the right reason.
Goldhaber and his collaborators seem to suggest these actions are justified as nothing else appears to be working. While I understand young people’s anger and fear over an unsustainable future environment, this stance is a bridge too far for me. Though I don’t entirely agree with “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” it did give me a lot to chew on and ruminate over … and for that I’m appreciative.