‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ Foregrounds Sabotage in the Climate Crisis

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), Daniel Goldhaber’s environmental activism-themed action film, begins with the slashing of car tyres: the plunging of a knife into rubber and the sharp whistle of escaping air. Activist Xochitl (Ariela Barer) leaves a detailed, printed note under the windscreen wiper explaining 'why I sabotaged your property’. This is not her first act of destruction in the name of the global climate crisis, and it won’t be her last. Her comrades in other parts of the United States, meanwhile, gather supplies and cover their tracks; armed with drugstore chemicals and bleach, they converge on an oil pipeline in west Texas that is to be their next target. This time, there will be no courtesy letter.

The radical suggestion at the core of academic Andreas Malm’s book-length manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline, (Verso, 2021), is that a liveable future requires the urgent dismantling of fossil fuel infrastructure through sabotage and destruction. Goldhaber's characters bring this argument to life. The result is a film sparsely constructed and punchy in its minimalist approach – Xochitl and the other activists carry out their plan with relatively few hitches – told with all the amped-up trappings of the heist genre: smash cuts edited to the beat of a pulsing score; tense faces shot in close-up; the hint of a spy in the group’s midst.

The eight activists are compelled to take action by various catalysts in their own lives. Xochitl, already involved in the fossil fuel divestment movement, mourns the death of her mother and the leukaemia diagnosis of her friend Theo (Sasha Lane), both caused by pollution from a local power station. Theo heeds the call and encourages girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson) to join too. Michael (Forrest Goodluck) is an Indigenous American who teaches himself how to make bombs in response to the occupation of his land by oil workers, while Texan Dwayne (Jake Weary) has been forced out of his home under eminent domain law to make way for the pipeline. Shawn (Marcus Scribner), a documentary filmmaker, and couple Logan (Lukas Gage) and Rowan (Kristine Froseth) complete the group.

Goldhaber, alongside co-writers Barer and Jordan Sjol, foregrounds the acts of sabotage, offering surface-level backstory and limited characterization through flashbacks. The story isn’t who these people are, it’s what they are willing to do. This approach, driven one might assume by the filmmakers’ sense of moral urgency, poses a risk. If the filmmakers hope to incite further global action on the climate crisis, then do such brief treatments of the characters’ motives, and issues like environmental racism, healthcare and poverty really express the severity of the situation, or give the film a sufficient emotional grounding?

At times, the thriller-style pace means skimming over crucial details, missing opportunities for greater engagement with a large and influential activist landscape — a box-ticking of scenarios and character types. If foregrounding eco-terrorism is the aim, then the film is little different from other recent, albeit engaging, dramas concerned with the same subject, such as Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War (2018), Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (2013) and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017). The association with Malm means the film may seem like a manifesto, but the rushed, underdeveloped nature of the film feels cynically orchestrated to narrate a contemporary political situation rather than to truly investigate the roots of it.

The film is not instructional either; Goldhaber, like Malm, avoids discussing how the bombs might actually be made. This is clearly a pragmatic choice – a film providing detailed instructions would surely never be distributed – and so the film hovers in an unclear space. Industry structures of production and distribution currently rely on funding from major corporations and and require films to be palatable enough for wide circulation, leaving little room for work that is revolutionary in its very making. Some have argued that the film’s radical potential is further diminished by the involvement of an American government counter-terrorism official as a consultant on the film, as the filmmakers revealed at a recent Q&A event at Toronto International Film Festival. At one moment in the film, Michael remarks that 'if the American empire is calling us terrorists then we’re doing something right’: the involvement of an agent in the making of the film casts this line in a new light.

As another mainstream attempt at eco-cinema, whose characters pursue their mission with political fervour and moral clarity, How to Blow Up a Pipeline further emphasizes that protests and lobbying are simply not enough, and that the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure is the only option. But is the way the film acknowledges this strain of argument sufficient? Maybe its stylized aesthetic and genre appeal will draw in a persuadable crowd who will walk out as committed climate activists, but a film this thin doesn’t seem like enough.

_{Main image: How to Blow Up a Pipeline, 2022, film still. Courtesy: Neon}