Yahoo Movies ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ Is the Hottest Date Movie of the Season
“We found love in a hopeless place,” Rihanna famously sang. And there’s nowhere quite as hopeless as the anthropocene — our current geological era, in which humans have begun to have an adverse impact on Earth’s climate. Fatalism about the future of our planet can certainly kill the mood, but, as luck would have it, the gripping new eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline sizzles with an urgency that borders on the sensual. Yeah, you’re gonna want a date for this one.
The movie, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall and releases wide on Friday, takes its inspiration from a 2021 treatise of the same name by Swedish professor Andreas Malm. Contrary to the title, the book is not an instruction manual (there’s even a joke about this in the adaptation), rather a critique of nonviolent climate activism that argues for the legitimacy of sabotage in the pursuit of environmental justice. The eight comrades of the fictional How to Blow Up a Pipeline put that principle into action with a daring plan to destroy a crucial piece of oil infrastructure in West Texas, hoping to inspire others with their example.
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If that doesn’t sound like the height of eroticism, just wait. The film gets your blood pumping from the drop and doesn’t waste a second of its hour-and-forty-minute runtime, propelled all the while by composer Gavin Brivik’s hypnotic score. We find the young activists, led primarily by Xochitl (Ariela Barer, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Daniel Goldhaber), coming together to realize a shared objective despite their varied backgrounds and radicalizing motives. Xochitl’s childhood friend Theo (Sasha Lane) has been diagnosed with leukemia that likely stemmed from pollution where they grew up; she wants revenge on industrial capitalism. Michael (Forrest Goodluck), a Native American, has been teaching himself to make improvised bombs, furious about the oil rigs that dominate the landscape of the Dakotas. The most unlikely member of the crew is Dwayne (Jake Weary), a cowboy type you can easily picture in a MAGA hat — except his property was seized through eminent domain for a fuel company that wants to run pipe through it.
These people are attractive in the same way the movie is: cool, gritty, focused, bracingly direct, and hyper-competent. Unsentimental, you might say, on the far end of the spectrum from any hippie stereotype. They have thought hard about what they want to do, and why, and even as they crack jokes about the dangerous mission at hand or argue the precise ethics of it, they display a fierce respect for one another. You envy their righteousness, and their courage to act on conviction. Imagine if, instead of looting millions from a casino, the cast of Ocean’s Eleven were twentysomething punks taking down ExxonMobil for the greater good of humanity. That’s hot.
Of course, not everything goes to plan: an accidental detonation, a surveillance drone, security guards, and broken equipment all ratchet up the tension, priming the audience for ecstatic release. Meanwhile, the characters’ individual stories are deftly woven through the action, each startling and realistic enough to put standard blockbusters to shame. The ensemble includes two couples — Theo convinces her girlfriend, Alisha (Jayme Lawson), to join the action, while Portland rabble-rousers Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage) are dealing with the aftermath of a previous arrest that may threaten the entire project. I won’t spoil which pair consummates their love in the desert brush while awaiting a signal from the rest of the team, but the frenzied hookup matches the viewer’s mounting desire for fireworks.
What you’re seeing on the screen throughout is literal and figurative chemistry, which reminds you that neither can be faked. How to Blow Up a Pipeline could have become a dour, moralistic exercise or a potboiler devoid of politics. How refreshing, then, that it presents a band of believable rebels, follows their revolutionary reasoning to its logical outcome, and lets us sit with the consequences of the choices they’ve made. Perhaps the most intriguing character of the bunch is Shawn (Marcus Scribner), a college classmate of Xochitl’s. Less outwardly angry than some in the collective, he’s the one we see drifting away from conventional climate protest and doomer hand-wringing toward incendiary means of change. This shift, like so much in the movie, excites with its raw possibility.
You’ll leave the theater buzzing as if from a shockwave, but also carrying a sense of how sexy the end of the world can be. This isn’t a matter of screwing as often as you can in the time we have left — I mean the animalistic allure of rejecting hopelessness to fight for survival. Sure, it helps to cast good-looking actors as guerillas prepared for whatever it takes. More than anything, though, How to Blow Up a Pipeline arouses by way of a striking, lucid question: You are alive right now, in a body. What are you going to do with it?
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