Review: How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)

One might be forgiven for expecting Daniel Goldhaber’s film How to Blow Up a Pipeline to be a didactic work of political agitprop. But thankfully the film is instead a suspenseful and thought-provoking treatment of the current political landscape. Taking its title and central ideas from Andreas Malm’s nonfiction work of eco-theory, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the film is the story of eight individuals, from various backgrounds and motivations, who come together to commit an act of politically-motivated property destruction. Put more bluntly, the film follows eight collaborators as they prepare to blow up a pipeline in West Texas. Revealing their motivations sequentially in flashback, the film deftly portrays the various circumstances that led each of the participants to this act of political violence, or what the characters themselves ultimately admit is eco-terrorism.

The film opens as eight individuals converge at a remote rural property in West Texas, where they will engage in the final stages of preparing to blow up a key pipeline, while working hard to avoid serious collateral damage to people or the environment. The primary individuals who the film focuses on are Xochitl (pronounced in the film as “So-chee"), played by co-writer Ariela Barer, and her childhood friend, Theo (Sasha Lane). We learn in the first few flashbacks that Xochitl’s mother died recently in a freak heatwave. Theo herself was earlier diagnosed with a rare leukemia, attributed by doctors to the oil refinery and chemicals near Theo’s childhood home in Long Beach, California. Theo and Xochitl become fed up with the lack of progress in campus oil divestment campaigns and other forms of eco-politics. Driven by their personal tragedies, they become convinced that direct action, that is sabotage and property damage, are not only justified, but the only way to get real change. They are joined by one of Xochitl’s classmates, Shawn (Marcus Scribner), and go about recruiting a team of individuals who come from different backgrounds and have different motivations for blowing up this pipeline.

One of the ways that How to Blow Up a Pipeline avoids coming across as propagandistic or moralistic is in how it treats its various characters. Rather than just having characters argue or debate various justifications for direct action and sabotage, it dramatizes them. It’s an effective use of “show, don’t tell” in filmmaking. Additionally, it suggests that those who might be invested in stopping polluters and carbon-emitters can come from vastly different backgrounds and make alliances across cultural and ideological lines in pursuit of a common goal. In that, it goes against much of what passes for “political” in our current moment.

Take, for instance, Michael (Forrest Goodluck). Michael is a young indigenous man from North Dakota. Each day he sees workers from the east arriving to extract precious resources from his home, setting up shanty towns, oil rigs, and burn-towers that dot the landscape and bring both chemical pollution and moral vice to town. Michael, tired of physically fighting with riggers, begins exploring the idea of pushing back by building bombs, which leads to his being recruited by the team to be their lead bomb-builder. Michael isn’t a university-educated activist; he’s driven by the material circumstances of his world around him and his connection to his home.

Likewise, Dwayne (Jake Weary) is perhaps the character most viewers wouldn’t expect to find in a film of this kind. Dwayne is a native Texan, a Christian, and gun owner. But Dwayne finds himself and his young pregnant wife driven off their land by claims of “eminent domain,” the idea that the government can appropriate private land for “public” use; in this case the building of a pipeline. Uncommented on, but implied is the irony of “public” use being primarily the profits of select energy producers. Dwayne believes this is deeply wrong and almost impossible to fight in court for a person of his means. Additionally, he fears the pollution and toxins that the pipeline will expose his new child to. While being interviewed for an environmental documentary, he meets Shawn who recruits him into their group and draws on his knowledge of the local terrain and disciplined competence.

The final three collaborators are Alisha (Jayme Lawson), Theo’s girlfriend, the greatest skeptic at first, who is motivated to act out of her love for Theo, and lastly two anarchist punks, Rowan (Kristen Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage), who are the ones least known to the group and the biggest wild cards. Their behaviour and questionable loyalties lend the film its greatest moments of tension, but resolve in ways that are unpredictable and yet true to character.

Even with the variety of perspectives and examples of people driven to extreme action, you may find yourself as a viewer who is unsympathetic for a variety of reasons. But the film’s success doesn’t hinge on you being compelled by their implicit arguments for extreme actions like industrial sabotage. Have you ever enjoyed watching a mobster film despite thinking the characters are despicable? Have you ever found yourself caught up in the stakes of a heist film even if you’d never even shoplift in real-life? How to Blow Up a Pipeline works in part because it brings the suspense and mission-oriented plot of a political thriller and marries it to the structure of a heist film.

Perhaps one of the best comparisons is one that the creators of the film mentioned in a recent podcast interview, and that is the films of Michael Mann and his focus on people who live by various codes, some which we may find baffling or repellent, but whom we nonetheless come to admire for their professionalism and dedication. Watching the characters in the process of carrying out this dangerous act is compelling on its own terms, lending the film a Mann-like procedural structure that is inherently cinematic and compelling. This structure frames the obstacles and the moral dilemmas the characters face as well.

While narratively and structurally, Mann is a decent comparison, Goldharber’s film is still rougher around the edges, with its washed out and hand-held photography capturing the dystopian landscapes of West Texas or Long Beach, miles of pipes and tailing towers burning in the distance. It has a welcome immediacy that many environmental documentaries lack. The film is firmly rooted in the current moment, paying attention to the logistics of digital and mobile operational security. At numerous points characters remind each other to turn off their phones or put them in a fridge to avoid surveillance. In addition to lending the film immediacy, it reminds us of how science-fictional our current moment can be. At another point, the scouting of the hole-digging site for the bomb is tracked by a surveying drone that Dwayne brings down.

Politically, as a film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline might be better compared to something like Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers as a document of how a small guerilla force might attempt to take on a larger enemy. While similarly not a documentary, like Pontecorvo’s film How to Blow Up a Pipeline goes some way toward actually exploring how one might blow up a pipeline; certainly more than Malm’s book did, which, though provocatively titled, might better be described as an exploration of “why” one might want to blow up a pipeline, rather than the steps one would have to take to do so. This gives the film an ethnographic vitality, as a record of what someone might be driven to do if one believed in a particular cause.

The protagonists of How to Blow Up a Pipeline come to realize that what they are doing will be labelled eco-terrorism, but also attempt to make the link between civil rights and political movements of the past. While we may see our own time as particularly tense and politically riven, political violence was arguably much more common even in the recent past of the 60s and 70s, with bombings of public buildings and retaliations committed by activists and counterintelligence agents far more frequently. But when we do experience political terrorism today, it is often greater in scale in both damage and the transmission of its happening to millions via mass media. But therein lies the challenge for those who feel an existential threat in the climate crisis; the scale of harm those they oppose are committing is also much larger than any direct action can rectify easily.

Weirdly, in thinking about the film, I was reminded of what is still for me perhaps one of the best eco-tales in cinema: Isao Takahata’s animated docu-drama Pom Poko, which involves a group of tanuki (dog-racoons) in Japan pushing back against incursions into their natural home by suburban development. The tanuki also commit industrial sabotage, even harming the humans and terrifying them, but ultimately they cannot stop the march of “progress.” Pom Poko is much more humorous than How to Blow Up a Pipeline, but also has a more melancholy and elegiac ending. It’s a movie tinged with sadness, while How to Blow Up a Pipeline has an edge of anger and desperation. In the end, we don’t know for certain what impact the actions of the characters in the movie will ultimately have. You may walk away from the film horrified or sympathetic, but either way you will be able to understand why someone would act in such an act of “self-defense.” And that kind of understanding of our fellow humans isn’t something we encounter every day at the cinema.

8 out of 10

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (USA, 2022)

Directed by Daniel Goldhaber; written by Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, Daniel Goldhaber, based on the book by Andreas Malm; starring Ariela Barer, Kristen Froseth, Lukas Gage, Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane, Jayme Lawson, Marcus Scribner, Jake Weary.

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