THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
by Arpad Okay. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is exactly what it sounds like. What draws a group of eight random, regular people together to commit a crime? Their experience. The institutions that shape their lives. Circumstance. This radical film directed by Daniel Goldhaber is magnificently composed, stylishly edited, and a thrilling way to address a political conversation: how the people involved feel. This is no faux documentary; it’s film. There’s no passive sensation of watching what’s happening. You are there. This is happening to you.
I left the theater talking about Gillo Pontecorvo. How can you not want to bring up The Battle of Algiers? A war movie that speaks to reason and finds itself on the side of terrorists. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is also a film of objective bias, one that tells both sides truthfully and then chooses one. It is a thought experiment, a succinct summation of subterfuge. What it has to teach and to whom is very much the question.
Besides Pontecorvo, I gushed about Pipeline’s white-knuckle slickness and how it trapped me in the moment like Katheryn Bigelow’s work. When the film does provide a moment of release, you realize you’ve been clenching for the last ten or fifteen minutes. Time doesn’t crawl — it often flies — but you are present for every moment.
Like any war film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is treated seriously. Nuanced like a good war film, artfully constructed like a good film. Its tension is held with humor. The look and pace feel like rock ‘n’ roll. Forest Christenson’s sound mixing is genius and essential to the atmosphere of ubiquitous tension. Synth wash melts into the goopy, unsettling sound of oil rushing through a phantom channel. The story’s professional aesthetic and relentless movement makes for an effortlessly gripping watch.
It’s a tidy little film. The intellectual danger of climate collapse is made real by the depth of the characters, but just as powerful is the palpable fear of being blown up, the risks taken to pull off the plan, the conflict and elation that comes from the movie sucking you in. The thought experiment aspect of it comes through here, too. Everyone does the best possible thing for the right reasons when presented with ideal conditions. There are no hard choices for Xochitl (Ariela Barer) like the ones Algiers‘ Ali La Pointe has to make.
The long-term vision is less perfect. Pipeline recognizes who pays and who gets paid. Who ends up in prison and who gets away. This problem affects everybody, including the audience, but the cast reflects who in society is doing the most about it. We aren’t given much of an epilogue for the action, just the actors. Good. If the story presented the problem, the solution, and the group who will take care of it, what does that leave for the audience to do?
The movie’s focus isn’t providing answers; it’s making people who get into “good trouble” real. The ensemble cast’s powerful performances sell the film’s empathetic character studies. You’re immersed in the world of their experience. Yes, there’s the thrill of the illegal manufacture and detonation of explosive substances. And, yes, their frustration is what turns citizens into guerrillas. You step into their shoes in magic cinema moments where the physical presence of fossil fuel machinery looms, the planet’s future as smoke, as fire, as waste blasting into the atmosphere. Awe at the scale of an industrial plant when the frames of How to Blow Up a Pipeline contrast it with the size of a person you care for.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is in theaters now. For showtimes, click this.
8 out of 10
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber.
Written by Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, and Jordan Sjol.
Cinematography by Tehillah De Castro.
Starring Ariela Barer, Kristine Froseth, Lukas Gage, Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane, Jayme Lawson, Marcus Scribner, and Jake Weary.
Produced by Alex Black, Alex Hughes, Ariela Barer, Daniel Goldhaber, Isa Mazzei, Adam Wyatt Tate, and David Grove Churchill Viste.
Rated R for some drug use and spicy resistance language.
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