A crew of young environmental activists execute a daring mission to sabotage an oil pipeline in Daniel Goldhaber’s taut and timely thriller that is part high-stakes heist, part radical exploration of the climate crisis.
Before going into this review, I feel I have to air one grievance. The subgenre of heist films can feel chaotic and confusing to outsiders, but to insiders, it can feel like a game, a challenge of mental wit to predict the end and appear the most intelligent person in the room. My viewing experience has been ruined multiple times by guessers telling me who they think did it and explaining why they were right. More often than not, they’re right, and they like to say the movie can’t be that good if they knew the twist all along. Maybe it’s because I’m terrible at guessing the twist, or perhaps it’s because I like to preserve the ingenuity or the filmmaker’s intent, but my dispassion for movie ‘guessers’ heightens whenever it comes to a heist film. Judging a film’s quality solely on whether the ending was predictable is one small metric in the much larger picture of a piece of work. Other elements include: Did it feel tense? Are the characters justified in their actions? Are we rooting for the characters? Even more straightforward questions like Did the setting influence how you saw the film? Most importantly: How did it make you feel? I try to preserve that experience of ‘feeling’ things like discovery and awe when it comes to heist films because trying to be smarter than a movie is nowhere near as exciting as dropping my jaw for the last twenty minutes. Having aired my grievance, let me say: I absolutely LOVED “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” and every bit of tension it had to offer brought me in close.
Based on a book/polemic about the failure of pacifism within the climate movement, the film takes the grander thesis of the book and weaves it into a taut narrative thriller about, you guessed it, blowing up an oil pipeline. The book’s core conceit revolves around the failure of climate change advocates to instigate any noticeable change over the last several decades worth of work. In it, author Andres Malm argues for sabotage as a viable means of defending the Earth. These ideas are notable throughout the film and used as an intelligent basis for several characters, but the film’s best success is translating those ideas into personal stakes, so we’re not left with highly moralized teenagers but kids who feel the weight of the world on their shoulders and decide to take action. The character flashbacks reveal how personal this mission is for everyone, which argues the mission well beyond its controversial origins. While the core characters are all under twenty-five in the film, it also lends an air of urgency. That generation will be the first to see the more devastating effects of climate change and will most likely suffer from a sense of impending doom regarding the Earth’s climate.
The cast in this film carries it. The central eight players of this team all come from different walks of life, bringing a rich diversity of ideologies and backgrounds to our crew. Ariela Barer plays Xochitl (so-chee), the leader of this crew. Her leadership feels most authentic when the cracks in her ruthless display. Barer plays her with enough vulnerability we understand this crew isn’t cool or hip. Beside her is Marcus Scribner playing Shawn, the terminally online college student who decides to back up his friend. His commitment to the cause (and ‘Rusty’ analog if you need an “Ocean’s Eleven” metaphor) comes in bringing together the crew and handling card details. He straddles the line between practical do-gooder and holy warrior. Sasha Lane plays our most downtrodden character, Theo, on a ticking clock with an apparent vendetta. Theo brings her girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson), who grounds the entire mission. She’s the one proposing counterarguments and playing Devil’s Advocate every time Xochitl goes off on one of her rants. She clearly is the least invested in the mission but the most invested in her lover, Theo. Follow that up with vagabond punk anarchists Logan and Rowan (Lukas Gage and Kristine Froseth), whose out-of-a-van lifestyle gets them into hot water and who definitely have the least clear heads out of them all. If anyone were to crack under pressure, it’s them. Then there’s Dwayne, the west Texas countryman, played by Jake Weary, who seems the least likely to belong in this group but has the most to gain. After oil companies forcibly remove him from his land via eminent domain, he has the know-how to plan it all. Lastly, there’s Michael, played by Forrest Goodluck, whose deadpan semi-suicidal bombmaker spells the most dangerous member of the group and arguably the most dedicated. Multiple times he iterates he doesn’t care what happens to him, be it exploding in an accident or getting arrested by the cops, so long as he takes down his target.
We meet this crew dead center of their ‘get a crew’ sequence. The film itself is not exactly a stylish heist film but errs on the tense visual language and harsher world-building of a crime thriller. It lends tension to the overall project, as we suspect any character could go at any moment. The film brings these disparate figures together and tells the story of their planning, practicing, and executing the sabotage. As the film progresses, it tells us the stories of each character, sometimes with depth, sometimes with levity, but always with an eye for stakes. Each flashback folds in on the story changing how we perceive each character, adjusting our expectations, and even changing what we expect. It’s precisely what we want from layered storytelling like this.
I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I let out my breath only when the credits rolled and relaxed a little. The film’s entirely centered on these eight crewmembers and their youth, making the whole thing seem impossible from start to finish. Yes, there’s a big twist. No, I’m not going to tell you. Objectively I’d warn all you ‘guessers’ that this twist feels probable and relatively straightforward, so if that’s going to ruin your prospect of a movie, you should see it anyways and tell me you saw that twist coming a mile away. I felt surprised and excited to see the story shift in a completely new direction.
“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” uses its actors and very sparse settings well. Not for one second does it feel so limited in its budget, nor does it fall back on the trappings of classic heist cinema. Instead, it sits somewhere closer to a crime thriller in the veins of “The Town,” “Heat,” or “Good Times.” The stakes feel very real, and even if your favorite crewmember isn’t personally motivated by climate change, this movie does a great job of backing everyone into a corner. Its central argument rests on the same argument as its source material: there is no time left, and drastic action is the only action that can make real change. I especially love the depiction of current climate activism in its toothless protest form. There’s a great secondary observation that even people of privilege can dilute the necessity of action. The leaders of climate activism are unlikely to feel the effects of its change so quickly and therefore argue for incremental systemic change, but naturally, radicalism falls to the disaffected members of this movement. For much the same reason, people enjoyed the Whale Watchers in the Pacific Ocean, they’ll get a kick out of this one.
In Theaters Friday, April 7th
