Directed by: Daniel Goldhaber
Starring: Ariela Barer, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, Kristine Froseth, Lukas Gage
Rated R, 104 minutes
In a report published earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, asserted: “Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.” The report highlights the impacts of climate change on everything from agriculture and infrastructure to the spread of infectious diseases and human displacement. “Deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” are necessary, the panel said, to mitigate the fallout from further warming.
Of course, the IPCC’s report is nothing new. Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for years, their warnings often met with a muted response (or, in some cases, outright denialism). Even if the last few years have seen an increase in public awareness, with activists like Greta Thunberg bringing more attention to climate change and films like “Don’t Look Up” getting an A-list cast to call out climate complacency, the problem persists. Changing weather patterns wreak ever more havoc—bigger hurricanes on the east coast, bigger wildfires out west—but the governments of the world, armed with detailed reports from the IPCC and others, still move too slowly.
The Swedish ecologist Andreas Malm, in his 2021 book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” argued that industrial sabotage is a logical next step in the fight to save the planet. Malm’s book, as you might imagine, drew a polarizing response, his intentions good but his suggestions deliberately destructive. The new fictionalized adaptation from Daniel Goldhaber (“Cam”) will not make Malm’s arguments any less polarizing, but this thoughtful and provocative thriller does clarify the stakes of the climate crisis, exploring how it could drive people to extreme lengths.
Following eight saboteurs convening in west Texas to blow up an oil pipeline, the movie wastes little time. The scenes are brief, the dialogue perfunctory, the characters developed only insofar as they illustrate different perspectives on the impacts of climate change. We meet a homeowner, for example, driven off his land to make room for the pipeline and furious at the oil industry for its greed, and a young woman with cancer, terminally ill from living near factories emitting harmful chemicals into the air. The group’s bomb maker is a Native American, resentful of the government that took over his ancestral homeland and poisoned it with oil refineries.
What could have been a self-righteous polemic against the capital-S System is lifted up by unpretentious performances and deft direction from Goldhaber. Forrest Goodluck (“The Revenant”), in particular, steals scenes as the morose bomb maker, Michael, his anger so calcified that he picks fights with strangers and refuses even the simplest acts of friendship. At the center of the story, though, is the group’s leader, Xochitl (Ariela Barer, “Atypical”), a student drawn to drastic activism after her mother’s death in a heat wave. With quiet poise and steely resolve, Xochitl issues orders that even the more unpredictable members of the group follow. Even the informant of the group, secretly texting an FBI agent, performs her job without question.
“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” isn’t instructive, as the title suggests, but it is procedural, focusing on the saboteurs’ painstaking precautions as they go about destroying property of great economic value. The devil, they know, is in the details, and so nothing—not the liquor bottle that might contain their DNA, not the tire tracks in the dirt—goes unaccounted for. There’s little bloodshed or violence, but their mission is as tense and taut as any thriller with a high body count.
It is still, however, a fictional story, and the movie is careful not to equate its radical plot with radical action. (In one flashback scene, a documentarian embarrasses himself trying to explain the importance of “raising awareness,” irritating everyone in the room.) But “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is an astounding film nonetheless because it’s also an ambitious work of art, pairing its shock factor with cinematic bravado. To feel its impact, one need only see its desolate landscapes, covered with hideous oil infrastructures like some deserted alien planet, or hear its futuristic score, brooding icily beneath the action. This is the future that climate change promises us, the movie warns in every creative decision, bearing its urgent message with clear-eyed conviction.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 4/21/23.