How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Film Review)
"Climate" activists have never felt so seen
Based on the 2021 book of the same name by Andreas Malm, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is a 103 minute film that goes into wide release on April 21st. The film is advertised as an “eco-heist” where “a crew of environmental activists plot a daring plan to disrupt an oil pipeline.” I have never seen another film like it and the first thing I did after watching was go online to find out how the film secured its financing.
According to New York Times article, “How to Build an Environmental Thriller in Five Not-So-Easy Steps,” after struggling to get backers, the filmmakers crashed Cannes and connected with a “crucial financier” that director Daniel Goldhaber had known previously. Goldhaber and his co-writers Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol hadn’t finished the script yet, but they knew what they wanted to express and their pitch was powerful enough to secure key financing and get the project off the ground.
From starting the script in January 2021 (when the book was released) to landing financing at Cannes in May 2021 to a TIFF premier in September 2022 (where the film was bought by NEON), they turned the project around in an impressive amount of time.
Goldhaber had directed one feature previously, CAM, a 2018 psychological horror set in the world of webcam pornography, and attended Harvard University where he completed a Visual and Environmental Studies film program. His parents are also climate scientists.
That’s why I don’t want to call the protagonists “environmental activists.”
Because they aren’t. They are land defenders, anarchists, and victims and loved ones of fossil fuel poisoning.
I heard about the film through Good Energy Story, an organization that “supports TV and film creators in telling wildly entertaining stories that honestly reflect the world we live in now—a world that’s in a climate crisis.” Founded by climate experts and communicators, the organization was created because of the lack of climate storytelling in Hollywood. According to a report Good Energy Story commissioned in partnership with with USC’s Lear Center, only 0.6% of film and tv scripts mention the term “climate change” and only 2.8% mention any “climate-related” word at all.
“How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” of course, doesn’t just “mention” climate change and other climate-related words; it’s entire plot revolves around them. Never before have I seen an honest narrative portrayal of the struggle against the oil and gas industry. (If you have seen other films like this, please tell me in the comments!) And rarely do I see films with such raw emotion, daring risk, tight plotting, and compelling acting. I think it’s a truly one-of-a-kind radical film. Though not everyone agrees…
“A truly radical film wouldn’t go out of its way to concoct sympathetic motives, or to keep its plotting so clean” is what the New York Times reviewer said. Causing one to wonder if a truly radical film is supposed to be messy? Poorly plotted? Have unsympathetic characters?
While the characters are indeed very sympathetic, none of them are fake. These people aren’t made up — they exist in the real world — and while bringing them together in a neatly-plotted narrative may feel contrived to some, I don’t believe it makes the film any less radical.
That’s why I don’t want to call the protagonists “environmental activists.” Because they’re not. They are land defenders, anarchists, and victims and loved ones of environmental poisoning. Maybe a film about environmental activists blowing up a pipeline would be less sympathetic and therefore more radical. But I don’t think so. I think the filmmakers’ choice to centre the individuals who have been most affected is the right choice.
Environmental activism is, too often, a response to the symptoms of climate change and does not identify its root cause. It is a privilege to be afraid of the future and not the present. While all of us have been affected by state-sanctioned greed and oppression, er, I mean “climate change,” most of us live privileged lives where we can block out the worsening reality around us (at least most of the time). This is not so for protagonists of the film. Which is what makes them sympathetic.
Andreas Malm’s book is a critique of the docility of environmental activism and though I haven’t read it, I do agree that the current methods of environmental activism are flawed. However I don’t think it’s because they’re too docile. I think it’s because they’re too future-focused, too insistent that the worst is yet to come.
The marketing for this film still keeps climate change as the boogeyman (and rightly so, considering the awareness level of the public), but the film’s message is clear: we need to take radical action right now because the most horrific aspects of “climate change” are already here.
The film is not really about “how” to blow up a pipeline but about “why” to blow up a pipeline. That is the real message and that is what will — hopefully — inspire us all to find a better way forward. Because the solution is so much more radical than blowing up pipelines.
A film like this is dangerous to state power not because it encourages you to disrupt dirty energy production, but because it encourages you to empathize with those who have been most affected by the colonial-capitalist state violence machine i.e. the root cause behind climate change. It demonstrates why individuals would go to such lengths to take a stand—and not just because they want a “better world for their grandchildren.”
Human beings have an incredible skill of normalizing and adapting. And we will continue normalizing and adapting to increasing climate chaos (just ask Octavia Bulter) unless or until we empathize with those who are struggling and dying right now. That means opening ourselves up to grief and not suppressing the pain that comes with that empathy. That is the real challenge, one much more difficult than exploding the infrastructure that keeps the colonial-capitalist machine running.
None of you need to go blow up a pipeline, but there is an equivalent risk in your life. One that requires courage, daring, and, most of all, community. I can’t tell you what that looks like for you, but I can tell you that watching this film might trigger in you an inner knowing that will propel you to take real change in your own life.
We’re all sympathetic characters. We’ve all been oppressed. We all hold the possibility of radical change. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Find a screening of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” near you.