REVIEW: ‘How To Blow Up A Pipeline’ Will Leave You Breathless

There’s a moment a little over halfway through Daniel Goldhaber’s unrelenting How to Blow Up a Pipeline where a rope used to haul an explosive frays and tears at the seams as sweat spills to keep what’s being lifted intact. That is the feeling the movie manages to capture for nearly two hours, leaving viewers taut, worn thin, and reverberating with a thundering heartbeat. Of all the strong elements of this eco-political adaptation of Andreas Malm’s book, the greatest is how it captures, then manifests, rage on screen. Breathless, angry, and burning bright with the type of rudderless discontent we feel when we’re fighting systemic oppression centuries in the making where the best bet is to fight a way out of the corner, we’ve been backed into, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a confident film that thrums with seething frustration. 

The film follows Xochitl (Ariela Barer,) Rowan (Kristine Froseth,) Logan (Lukas Gage,) Michael (Forrest Goodluck,) Theo (Sasha Lane,) Alisha (Jayme Lawson,) Shawn (Marcus Scribner,) and Dwayne (Jake Weary) as they band together to prevent the development of an oil pipeline. The climate crisis has reached a point of no return, forcing the hand of these environmental activists to strategize a means to fully capture the attention of the government, with many of those taking part in the fight already having felt personal repercussions. The varied backgrounds make for a much more thrilling story as we realize how little a chance they’d have had in working together had they not fought for the same cause. 

Dwayne is a father whose property the oil line is being built over. Xochitl and Theo grew up in Long Beach, California in an area with toxic pollution, leading to the former’s leukemia diagnosis. They’ve all come together as a means to create change, hoping that by detonating the explosives they’ll be able to expose the industry’s fragility. They’ve sought out self-inflicted justice by way of violence, placing themselves on the shelves of martyrdom because they’re doing this for the people who are most affected, though Alisha often points out that those who will be hurt most by blowing up the pipeline are those the group claims to want to protect. 

Written by Barer, Goldhaber, and Jordan Sjol, the script never ceases in surprises, less so in the immediate action and more in how our protagonists are rightfully characterized as layered, ultimately flawed individuals who believe in their fight. Their motives are strong, their execution planned, thoughtful, and patiently constructed. The film isn’t so much asking us to agree with what this group is doing (though it isn’t condemning them either) and instead asking us to put ourselves in the point of no-return mind space that would lead young people to do this. This isn’t mindless vandalism.

Instead, it’s chillingly procedural destruction as a means of sending out a greater message. That said, with the tag scene at the end of the film, the most haunting effect might be that after an act of broadcasted structural damage, there will be those who take the wrong message and rush to take part in a cause without actually being moved to action, just enticed by the thrill of notoriety. 

The cast is strong across the board, with Barer and Goodluck being handed two of the most difficult characters. Both Xochitl and Michael are ready and willing to lay their lives on the line for their movement, but it makes them rigid in extolling compassion for the other’s fears, concerns, or even injuries. Both are luminescent, though, Barer’s steely-eyed conviction packing power while Goodluck’s disarming aloof stoicism begs the question of what else lay beneath his exterior image. Gage and Froseth have less to do, though their characters are the two that exist best on the periphery of the story. 

A modern heist political thriller that refrains from didactic tendencies, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is gorgeous to look at, with an unsettling score that seeks to plummet the film into the depth of unease as we wait for repercussions or fatalities. Instead, what we get is a radicalized, politically geared film whose message is clear and unflinching, despite characters who fumble with their goals and intentions along the way. It’s an invigorating, teeth-grinding endurance test of a film that manages to both plead its message while never succumbing to preachiness. It’s a stressful viewing, but anything less so would be disingenuous. More films should try and bottle this blend of venomous rage.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is playing in select theaters now.