Even before I saw How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I thought it had a good chance of being the film of the year. Of the decade, even. I wondered if this might even feel like the first movie of the 21st century, zeitgeist-wise. Like, in 2099, when we start looking back at what the past hundred years have been about, the ideas that shaped them, will historians and culture-watchers point to this movie and say, "This is where things really kicked into gear"?
I think it's entirely plausible. I also hate that it requires a shit-ton of optimism to even suggest. And now that I've seen the movie, I believe my pre-screening suppositions remain credible.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline — it's an incendiary title for an incendiary film. It's a little bit like a horror flick, in that it's about a varied group of young people who get together and find themselves in a dangerous situation in which they might be killed. The situation is both of their making and not of their making. The nice green planet they're living on, with its temperate climate and drinkable water and breathable atmosphere, is being trashed beyond all recognition by people older and more powerful than they are. So they decide to express their displeasure with their environmental inheritance being destroyed in the only way left to them: by f—ing shit up, violently.
The planet is Earth, of course, in the here and now. I don't mean to suggest that the film pretends to be science fiction or that it withholds this information. It doesn't. It starts off feeling like a low-key drama about disaffected young people the likes of which we've seen plenty before, only not with the stakes this high. I am trying to impart to my global-warming-denying, or just plain inexcusably complacent, GenX peers and elders that, in many ways that really matter, we are bequeathing to future generations a planet that is already intrinsically alien to human life as it has existed since we evolved into something like our current form.
The film draws inspiration from the Andreas Malm's 2021 book of the same name, which is not a novel but a nonfiction manifesto about how the time for nice gentle placid protest has passed, and it's time to violently let the fossil-fuel industry know that their vampire-capitalist BS is no longer welcome. So all the characters here are invented for the film, played by a deliciously diverse array of fab young actors: Ariela Barer (who also co-wrote the script), Forrest Goodluck, Jayme Lawson, Sasha Lane, Marcus Scribner. We can see (without the film being an infodump) that, for the most part, these young people from nonwhite backgrounds have not been served well by the supposed American dream. So they plan to blow up an oil pipeline in Texas.
Pipeline is a heist drama, and an incredibly tense and intense one. But this is a movie that transcends mere entertainment, even while it is incredibly entertaining. It is about young people who are enormously desperate and have nothing to lose because their elders have specifically engineered a cultural and physical environment that makes them desperate. "We don't have time for divestment," one of the kids says.
I say "kid," but only because I'm old and they're young. They are adults who fully comprehend the future they are facing. This is a movie about how nihilism is optimism. Are they gonna blow themselves up in the process of manufacturing their own improvised explosives? Maybe. "I don't really care," one of them says with a resigned shrug when the topic is brought up. They have no other choice. ♦
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE
