How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022 | USA | 103 minutes | Daniel Goldhaber)

It’s hard not to sympathize with the environmental activists turned ecoterrorists at the heart of the potent new movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Eight young persons have so much justified rage from the cruelties of American capitalism that they find the best course of action to blow up an oil pipeline in West Texas. This movie is a meticulously planned scheme about how the photogenic gang of eight plans to commit their act of terrorism.

With such an inflammatory title, it should surprise exactly no one that this is an overtly political movie. I found a lot of the political theorizing overly simplistic and unsophisticated, but it’s hard to deny how riveting this movie is. Each character has their own motivations so it’s not a common ideology that unites them but a shared sense that laissez faire capitalism is causing remarkable pain and misery in their lives while others are getting rich. I did, though, roll my eyes when Michael (the great Forrest Goodluck) says at one point, “If the American empire is calling us terrorists, we’re doing something right.” Mohammad Atta told himself the same thing. To be fair, I was also once a college sophomore who thought he knew everything when I was in my twenties, too. 

The movie is too smart to blindly accept the characters rationalizations at face value or to endorse such extreme measures. It does advocate for the urgency of fighting climate change. 

I found Xochitl (wonderfully played by Ariela Barer) to be one of the most interesting characters. She holds industrialism and pollution responsible for killing her mother during a heatwave in Long Beach while she’s away at college. Her friend Theo (Sasha Lane) attributes her leukemia to the same pollution and she’s on board too. That core group, which also includes Theo’s supportive but not as strident girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson), and Xochitl’s college friend Shawn (Marcus Scribner, who I recognized as one of the funniest characters on the great sitcom “Black-ish”) make up an emotional axis that I found eliciting the most sympathy. 

I found the editing and pacing quite extraordinary. We would often see the planning of the bombing followed by a quick cut back to flashback origin story. Rather than being a distraction, it became easier for me to absorb the story. 

When we get to the ultimate fork in the road – Do they actually go through with the bombing? Does it succeed? I won’t say – the result doesn’t matter what happens because the message of the movie has already been conveyed explicitly. 

I’m not going to say that the movie turned me into a true believer but the pacing, the editing, the acting, and the empathy the characters generated, all turned this into one of the most absorbing movies I’ve seen in a while. 

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How to Blow Up a Pipeline is now playing at SIFF Cinema Uptown.