It’s a charged word, terrorism. It’s unsettling, challenging, alarming. And this is something that Daniel Goldhaber’s propulsive eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline smartly acknowledges. Even on the eve of a radical act of violent protest – the destruction of two sections of Texas’s oil infrastructure – some of the environmental activists behind the plan are reluctant to use the term. Rowan (Kristine Froseth), a 22-year-old from Portland, Oregon, prefers to think of herself as a “revolutionary” or “gamechanger”. Other members draw parallels with the Boston Tea Party or the civil rights movement. But Theo (Sasha Lane), a young woman from a poisoned suburb of Long Beach, California, is under no illusions. “They’re gonna call us terrorists. Because we are doing terrorism.” Her terminal cancer diagnosis, the consequence of a childhood growing up in the shadow of an oil refinery, means that Theo is done with tiptoeing around the truth, however unpleasant it might be.
This debate, lubricated by liquor and loosened by night-before nerves, is a pivotal moment that comes some 30 minutes into the film. It’s a scene that concedes that yes, these characters are extremists whose actions will have potentially devastating consequences. But it also takes an empathic view, making the case that, ultimately, these are ordinary people impelled to act by the extraordinary circumstances in which they find themselves. It’s morally complex territory – the knotty ethical issues that underpin the tautly executed action have some parallels with those of Paradise Now, Hany Abu-Assad’s largely sympathetic portrait of a pair of Palestinian suicide bombers. It’s worth noting, however, that Pipeline’s protagonists are scrupulous about targeting infrastructure rather than people. “We’re not murderers,” stresses Rowan, when her feckless pot-head boyfriend, Logan (Lukas Gage), suggests that anyone who works for an oil company is fair game.
It’s an impressively assured second picture from Goldhaber, whose debut film, Cam, achieved minor success on the festival circuit – a gripping piece of film-making, which deftly weaves the characters’ backstories into a tense account of the plot’s execution. As such, it works on two levels: as a nervy thriller, driven by Gavin Brivik’s pulsing, paranoid score and Tehillah De Castro’s twitchy, restless cinematography; and as a lightning rod for the mounting anger of climate-conscious audiences that feel let down by government inaction on a looming global crisis.
It is, however, a film about the act of protest, rather than the impact. The picture is rather hazier when it comes to the consequences of the sabotage, although one character concedes that it will, inevitably, be the poorest members of society that take the hardest hit from a breakdown in the supply chain of fossil fuels. This is one of several areas in which the film comes up short when compared with Kelly Reichardt’s similarly themed but superior Night Moves, an equally tense activist procedural but one that acknowledges that acts of violent protest, however well-planned, can have dire and sometimes deadly ramifications.
This criticism, of a failure to confront the consequences of this mode of protest, has also been aimed at the film’s source material. Goldhaber adapted the screenplay from the nonfiction book of the same name by Andreas Malm, along with co-writers Ariela Barer (who also stars in the film as Xochitl, the ringleader of the group and Theo’s childhood friend) and Jordan Sjol. Malm’s book, which was published in 2021, is critical of non-violence and pacifism in the climate movement, making a case for “intelligent sabotage” rather than protest and mass mobilisation, but, according to some critics, failing to discuss in depth the aftermath of such destructive techniques.
Ultimately, however, much of the film’s success comes from its ability to balance the political, theoretical elements of the subject against the more emotional and personal character details. Xochitl’s impotent fury is focused by the death of her mother and by Theo’s terminal diagnosis; Dwayne (Jake Weary), a blue-collar Texan and God-fearing family man, is prompted to act when his family’s land is requisitioned by an oil company; short-fused loner and self-taught explosives expert Michael (Forrest Goodluck) is ready to take his one-man fight against environmental polluters to a wider stage; Shawn (Marcus Scribner) is the relatable everyman, a climate activist who, like many, is despairing at the lack of progress earned by conventional methods. And yes, the character archetypes are a little on the nose at times, but it’s hard to think of another film as emphatically, passionately and furiously of the moment as this one.
