In the midst of what many believe may end up being the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, it’s understandable if you’re overcome with anxiety over our imminent, dreadful future. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization of governments who since 1988 have studied climate change and its future risks, we are approximately 10 years away from passing a dangerous temperature threshold, effectively guaranteeing irreversible climate disruption. In many ways, such a future is unimaginable; though writer David Wallace-Wells wrote a book in 2019, The Uninhabitable Earth, about what it may look like and it’s not pretty. Or if movies are more of your thing, The Day After Tomorrow came out almost 20 years ago. If the COVID-19 pandemic is any indication of our ability to adapt and sacrifice for the greater good, we are gravely ill-equipped for the impending climate disaster.
That’s why How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a movie based on Andreas Malm’s 2021 nonfiction call-to-action How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, comes at the perfect time. In his book, Malm argues that it’s time the climate activism movement escalates past nonviolent protest, opting instead for sabotage and property destruction. The film follows Xochitl (Ariela Barer, Runaways), a college student from Long Beach, CA, who after the death of her mother from a heat wave produced by the pollution from the city’s oil refineries organizes a ragtag group of fed up activists to detonate explosives along an oil pipeline in Texas.
As Veronica Phillips writes for
, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, is as much a heist film as a capital-p political one. Just like in Heat or the Ocean’s trilogy, the movie’s director Daniel Goldhaber (Cam) takes us along for the ride as the crew is assembled and carries out their act of environmental terrorism (or justice depending on where you stand). We also find out their motivations: Shawn, played by Marcus Scribner (Black-ish), has some reservations about the plan but knows he wants to take action after doom scrolling climate news on Twitter just like me; Dwayne (Jake Weary, Pretty Little Liars) joined because oil companies seized his family’s land through eminent domain; Michael (Forrest Goodluck; The Revenant) learned how to make bombs on his own trying to protect his North Dakota reservation; and others in the group have their own reasons. As the movie goes on, you can’t help but to feel the heightened, palpable tension of their crazy plan coming into fruition.I came away surprised after watching this movie in the wee hours of the morning. Reading some of the critical reactions to the film, I knew it would be good but I wasn’t quite prepared for it to be as compelling of a story as it was. Even if you don’t agree with its politics or if you aren’t looking for a deep message alongside your entertainment, How to Blow Up a Pipeline has more than enough to scratch your itch. The movie’s pacing keeps you engaged throughout its brisk 104 minute run time. In the end, it may resolve itself a little too cleanly but it was a fun ride regardless.
It’s certainly a movie (and call for a real world provocation) that is long overdue. Look no further than the first GOP presidential debate where only one candidate said they believed human behavior is responsible for climate change, and even he did so tepidly. Or celebrities and the uber-wealthy taking planet-harming private plane trips while the rest of us have to adjust our habits and take blame, and eventually, the brunt of the harmful effects. If we don’t take the drastic action suggested by Malm in the book or Goldhaber in this movie, we may not have much of a future to even look back at our past mistakes.
One of the movie’s strongest moments is when the crew sits by a bonfire ahead of the detonation day. Xochitl admits to the group whether they use passive means of protests or not, the media/law enforcement/public will label them terrorists anyway—they might as well prove them right. About nonviolence Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography, “I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.” It’s clear that we have run out of time, we can no longer postpone a solution to climate change.
What are your thoughts? Is property destruction and sabotage a bridge too far or is it long overdue?