Few films feel as excitingly jacked in to our current social climate as How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

Many films are easy to recognize immediately as being of the moment, but few feel as excitingly jacked in to the current social climate as How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Based on last year’s controversial manifesto by Andreas Malm, which argued for violent sabotage as the only viable method to effectively fight climate change, director Daniel Goldhaber’s fictionalized adaptation firmly puts the “how” back in the book’s title in thrillingly dramatizing what these actions could and probably should look like.

Goldhaber frenetically drops us into the midst of a plot already underway, in which a ragtag group of climate activists from all over the country, and from different backgrounds, conspire to blow up a West Texas oil pipeline. Xochitl (Ariela Barer), introduced in an opening scene where she sabotages a parked car while leaving a note under the windshield explaining the reasons why, is their de facto leader. From there, How to Blow Up a Pipeline gradually acquaints us with each member of the group via flashbacks interspersed with the present-day storyline.

But the filmmakers clearly don’t want to dispel the propulsive momentum of the primary narrative, so these origin stories are kept brief. Throughout How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Goldhaber and co-writers Barer and Jordan Sjol give us just enough to fully understand who these individuals are, as well as the often intensely personal reasons for their radicalization.

For one, Xochitl’s friend Theo (Sasha Lane) is dying of an illness spurred on to her exposure to radioactive environments as a child, while an older Texas native named Dwayne (Jake Weary) is locked in a futile legal fight with the government to block the pipeline from running through his property. And the actors’ credibly lived-in performances ensure that their characters are never reduced to stock types, from the explosives expert played by Forrest Goodluck to the boisterous young couple played by Kristine Froseth and Lukas Gage.

Goldhaber has built an incredibly effective tension machine with How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which was shot on warm, grainy 16mm and boasts a galvanizing electronic score by Gavin Brivik. As the group’s plan speeds past the point of no return, the film effectively melds its intimate style into the clichés of a large-scale action movie, as in the moment where two pipeline workers show up at precisely the wrong moment or in a late twist that throws one of the character’s motivations into question. There’s even a bit of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear—and, by extension, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer—in two unbearably anxiety-inducing sequences of the crew carefully moving their D.I.Y. bomb to its blast location.

Ultimately, How to Blow Up a Pipeline works as well as it does because of the rousing call to action that underlies its every moment. It’s beside the point whether the actions that the characters take in the film are “right” or “wrong”; they’re understood here to be the only pragmatic ways for the characters to achieve any kind of liveable future in a world run by corrupt institutions bent on destroying the planet for self-serving capitalist gains. By the time it reaches its heart-pumping finale, Goldhaber’s live-wire spectacle has vigorously situated itself as a cinematic rage against the machine of the most urgently provocative kind.

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Sign Up for Our Weekly Newsletter