How to Blow Up a Pipeline movie review: it means the earth to them

I’m always up front about my biases, but I’m gonna be extra clear in this instance. Even before I saw this movie, I thought it had a good chance of being the film of the year. Of the decade, even. And I don’t mean that I think it’s gonna win tons of Oscars or have the biggest box office. (I really hate those awards prognosticators who start predicting next year’s nominees and winners before spring has sprung and no one has even seen most of the movies that will be in contention.) I mean in a more fundamental, profoundly philosophical way. I wondered if this might even feel like the first movie of the 21st century, zeitgeist-wise. Like, in 2099, when we start looking back at what the past hundred years had been about, the ideas that had shaped it, will historians and culture-watchers point to this movie and say, “This is where things really kicked into gear”?

Now that I’ve seen the movie, I believe my pre-screening suppositions remain credible. I also hate that it requires a shit-ton of optimism to even suggest that.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline. It’s an incendiary title for an incendiary film. It’s a little bit like a horror flick, in that it’s about a varied group of young people who get together and find themselves in a dangerous situation in which they might be killed. (Director and coscreenwriter Daniel Goldhaber’s previous feature film is 2018’s Cam, about a cam girl facing some weirdness. I haven’t seen it, though I plan to now, but it sounds like a smaller-scale version of the existential GenZ nightmare at play here.) The situation is both of their making and not of their making. The nice green planet they’re living on, with its temperate climate and drinkable water and breathable atmosphere, is being trashed beyond all recognition by people older and more powerful than they are. So they decide to express their displeasure with their environmental inheritance being destroyed in the only way left to them: by fucking shit up, violently.

The planet is Earth, of course, in the here and now. I don’t mean to suggest that the film pretends to be science fiction or that it withholds this information. It doesn’t. It starts off feeling like a low-key drama about disaffected young people the likes of which we’ve seen plenty before, only not with the stakes this high. I am trying to impart to my global-warming-denying, or just plain inexcusably fucking complacent, GenX peers and those older than us that, in many ways that really matter, we are bequeathing to future generations — including those already alive, like the characters in this movie — a planet that is already intrinsically alien to human life as it has existed since we evolved into something like our current form. (I’m not your fucking teacher. Google “how climate change has already put us on a new planet” to learn more.)

This was inspired by the 2021 book of the same name by Andreas Malm, which is not a novel but a nonfiction manifesto about how the time for nice gentle placid protest has passed, and now it’s time to let the fossil-fuel industry know that their vampire-capitalist bullshit is no longer welcome. With violence: not against people or animals but against property and infrastructure. So all the characters here are invented for the film, played by a deliciously diverse array of fab young actors: Ariela Barer (who also cowrote the script), Forrest Goodluck (The Miseducation of Cameron Post, The Revenant), Jayme Lawson (The Batman, Farewell Amor), Sasha Lane (Hellboy, The Miseducation of Cameron Post), Marcus Scribner (The Good Dinosaur, Farewell Amor). Beautifully, not a lot of infodumping is going on in this movie — we are mostly left to figure it out — but we can see that for the most part, these are young people from nonwhite backgrounds, some seemingly indigenous, who have not been served well by the supposed American dream. (The oil pipeline they are planning to blow up is in Texas.) There’s one character, a rancher played by Jake Weary (It: Chapter Two, It Follows), who is white, about whom it might be easy to assume that he a Republican — and maybe he is! though nothing is mentioned on this matter that I can recall — but even he is unhappy with the oil company that wants to despoil his land with the pipeline These Kids Today are working together to blow up.

So, like, when carbon crimes hit home, there is little difference between left and right. And carbon crimes are hitting home everywhere now.

Pipeline is a heist drama, and an incredibly tense and intense one. But this is a movie that transcends mere entertainment, even while it is incredibly entertaining. It is about young people who are enormously desperate, and who have nothing to lose, because their elders have specifically engineered a cultural and physical environment that makes them desperate and that has left them no other options. We don’t have time for divestment, one kid says. We need to show how vulnerable the oil industry is, another kid says.

I say “kid,” but only because I’m old and they’re young. They are adults who fully comprehend the dire future they are facing unless they do something about it now. Nihilism is their only optimism. Are they gonna blow themselves up in the process of manufacturing their own improvised explosives, one kid wonders? “I don’t really care,” another says with a resigned shrug. They have no other choice. Nihilism is optimism.

I cannot help but think about the juicy fact that the very existence of this movie, the title of which is going to flood the Internet and feature in so many user-searches, is its own kind of radical culture-jamming. (Yes, the book also exists, but movies, even modest indie ones, have so much more reach than even bestselling books.) A web search to get information on how to actually blow up a pipeline will now be just one needle in piles and piles of needles.

more films like this:
• Night Moves [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Mubi UK | BFI Player UK | Curzon Home Cinema UK]
• American Honey [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Kanopy US | Showtime US]