How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a new environmental thriller film loosely inspired by Andreas Malm’s book of the same name, asks the question of our time: in the face of imminent climate collapse, at what point should we abandon attempts to work within political systems and resort to violence?
Depending on one’s geographic exposure to the effects of climate change, answers to this question will differ. For the band of furious young people in the movie, seeing the oil fields of west Texas cements their resolve. Seeing no other meaningful solutions, they plot to bomb a major pipeline and spike oil prices, hopeful that others will do the same and through cascading acts of sabotage, accelerate the transition to renewable energy. Or at least halt oil production.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline unfolds in a nonlinear plot structured around its characters. As the group proceeds with the heist, the film jumps back in time to show how each character came to eco-terrorism. The moment viewers wonder why Theo (Sasha Lane) wants to bomb a pipeline, the film cuts back in time to her life in Southern California where she grew up next to an oil refinery. Now fatally ill from the refinery’s poisons, Theo wants to seek vengeance on an industry that got away with taking her life.
The brilliance of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not just that it is a new type of environmental film, but that it presents the character’s radical actions as virtuous, forcing the audience to do some critical thinking. Why wouldn’t Xochitl (played by the film’s co-writer Ariela Barer) feel comfortable destroying fossil fuel infrastructure after witnessing the futility of her college’s three-person fossil fuel divestment campaign?
The movie’s most compelling character is Dwayne, a through-and-through Texan who takes up arms after his land is destroyed during the pipeline’s construction. Dwayne and his family have fallen victim to the very real tyranny of eminent domain, which allows for the seizure of land needed for “essential” utilities. With Dwayne’s land ruined by a legal loophole, he sees bombing the pipeline as a way of getting back at the fossil fuel industry. Again, who can blame him?
The frustration and cynicism the characters display throughout How to Blow Up a Pipeline comes as the result of decades of procrastination and apathy by political leaders. The characters feel what has become a generational phenomena among Gen Z: climate despair. With youth having limited political influence and political leaders beholden to the fossil fuel industry, certain young people like those in this film will only feel despair for so long before they take up violence to protect their future.
Outside the character specifics, How to Blow Up a Pipeline follows many heist movie motifs, made interesting by the film’s environmental twist on the genre. In order to adequately destroy the pipeline, the group must attach two enormous, heavy bombs—made by Michael, the group’s bomb “expert”—to two different parts of the pipeline. Michael, a nihilistic radical played by Indigenous actor Forrest Goodluck, gives the film an idiosyncratic comedic relief. The conservation center his mom encourages him to work at is “just a way to make white people feel better.” Therefore, he feels he must take more direct action.
What makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline unique in the genre is that it features two different races against time: The first is the heist itself; the second occurs in the background and includes the audience—can humanity reduce greenhouse emissions fast enough to survive? While classic heist films like Ocean’s Eleven revolve around taking a risk for financial gain, the crew in How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s is compelled to their heist for global survival. This makes their mission all the more urgent.
In a certain sense, How to Blow Up a Pipeline couldn’t exist without its audience, or the current political moment. Following the destruction of the pipeline, Xochitl films a TikTok before being arrested, in which she explains that “this was an act of self defense.” The question of whether or not the filmmakers want viewers to use sabotage and violence as a tactic of climate protest is irrelevant. At the screening I attended, where the film’s producer Adam Wyatt Tate was there for a Q&A, Tate said the question of whether or not the audience should actually blow up pipelines is up to them.
We should not get lost in the weeds about whether or not the film is advocating for the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure or a reevaluation of the climate movement’s current tactics. How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s message is simple: get mad and do something about it.