Neon
Forrest Goodluck in a scene from “How to Blow Up a Pipeline”
On the eve of the COP26 conference in Glasgow in October 2021, American climate envoy John Kerry called the summit the “last best hope for the world to get its act together.” When COP26 ended in November, international leaders did not take radical action. Instead, the final language in the agreement was watered down to remove calls to phase out fossil fuels.
In the year and a half since that apparently last hope, the climate situation has only gotten worse, with CO2 emissions continuing to rise. And precious time to save the planet has ticked away. In 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put out a dire message, warning that there were only 12 years left to prevent irreversible damage from rising temperatures. That was five years ago, and while the U.S., China, and Europe have since greatly increased zero-carbon energy investment, the IPCC’s latest report said that those efforts are still “insufficient to tackle climate change.” At the same time, authorities have cracked down on climate activists, and fossil fuel companies have seen record profits.
It’s also in that context that the new movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline was written, shot, and released. The film, in theaters on April 7, adapts Swedish scholar Andreas Malm’s 2021 book of the same name on the need for direct action in the form of sabotage and property damage alongside protests in the face of the climate crisis. The book is famously not actually a how-to book, nor a narrative, which left the writing team of director Daniel Goldhaber, star Ariela Barer, and Jordan Sjol with a unique challenge. The result is a gripping, pulse-pounding thriller about a diverse group of activists banding together to blow up an oil pipeline in West Texas. It’s also the best film of the year so far.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline drops audiences into the action, following college students Xochitl (Barer) and Shawn (Marcus Scribner), Xochitl’s friend Theo (Sasha Lane) and her partner Alisha (Jayme Lawson), bitter North Dakota Native American Michael (Forrest Goodluck), libertarian Texan Dwayne (Jake Weary), and Portland anarchist crustpunk couple Logan and Rowan (Lukas Gage and Kristine Froseth) as they meet in person to carry out the act of sabotage. The film is light on exposition, instead joining the characters as they enact the scheme they’ve already planned out in detail. There are some flashbacks explaining how the diverse group of characters have their own reasons for coming together to blow up a pipeline, but the actual planning and plotting is left vague. Instead, the audience learns as the characters do. It’s an immersive approach and rewarding, particularly as different challenges and unexpected obstacles face them.
When the film was first conceived, the situation was dire. Now, after the 19 months from conception to completion, the planet is in worse condition. Extreme wildfires, storms, drought, and floods obviously strengthened by warming have killed thousands worldwide.
The filmmakers wisely chose not to make the movie preachy. Characters are well aware of what is killing the planet and hurting communities; they don’t need lectures or presentations. The struggles they face, from living in the shadows of refineries to seeing their land exploited by oil companies and traveling energy workers, feel real. At a panel discussion in Los Angeles on April 1, Goldhaber said that it’s time to move away from building awareness to taking action. The realities of climate change and pollution are apparent around the world, whether one is on the streets in climate protests or living in chemical spill–ravaged East Palestine, Ohio. In the same way that the sabotage is presented in a direct way, so too is the characters’ understanding of why it’s a viable option or even a necessity. The science is clear, even when oil-producing countries try to water down language in IPCC reports.
The urgency of the real-world situation and the crew’s taut filmmaking contribute to one of the best thrillers in recent memory.
The question both Malm and the film’s writers grapple with is what to do when world governments are not reacting logically to science they say they accept. In America, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines have leaked multiple times, contaminating waterways and soil. The Biden administration, which pushed through the largest climate measures in American history (watered down from earlier proposals, and still not enough in the face of climate change) has still approved major oil drilling projects on federal lands, a violation of Biden’s own 2020 campaign promise. He even pushed for Saudi Arabia not to cut oil production.
So what will it take to stop the planet’s destruction? Malm, for his part, pointed positively to the increased number of people taking part in protests and strikes in recent years, but he argued in his book that the movement was hampered by its own aversion to actions like property destruction. Malm has stressed his opposition to violence and hurting others, but said that tactics like infrastructure damage can help slow or even stop some of the gears in the fossil fuel industry.
In the foreword to his book, Malm noted that the pandemic had ground climate activism to a standstill, as it had with every other aspect of life in early 2020. But the fossil fuel industry never stopped. In the film adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the physical presence of the oil industry is like a monster. Refineries and drilling infrastructure loom over the characters in the background. Wide shots in Long Beach and North Dakota showing the machinery and structure strike a level of dread more in line with a horror movie than a heist film. It correctly points out that the damage from the industry is self-perpetuating. It’s not just the opening of new sites, but the ongoing operation of existing ones. Every day, they cause greater cumulative harm.
In this reality, both Malm and the film argue, direct action is both logical and a valid strategy that shouldn’t be ignored. Even completely peaceful protest efforts have been met with psychotic violence and legal punishment. Activists who tried to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline were attacked by riot police. Law enforcement considered people protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline to be engaging in “domestic terrorism.” This year in Atlanta, climate activists protesting the construction of a police training site dubbed “Cop City” were met not only with riot police, but 26 people who peacefully marched on the site were charged with domestic terrorism. Even if the climate movement is not engaging in the kind of direct action the film portrays, the response and tactics from those in power are already severe.
Yet, as Goldhaber said on April 1, “doomism is not an option.” The movie works in part because it rejects defeatism. At a March 21 Q&A after a screening, Goldhaber said that was the DNA of the project. “You have so many stories about leftist movements or progressive movements right now that are fundamentally stories of collapse, stories of people that cannot come together to do something, stories of failure,” he said. “For us, literally I think the first idea we had was Ocean’s 11 for ecoterrorism, which is kind of a bit of a Hollywood fantasy wish fulfillment, but those movies are so successful at building culture and to some extent at building empire. To refuse to engage with that form of communication is to cut off a massive opportunity to build culture on a kind of scalable level.”
Hence the diverse group of saboteurs. Everyone has a reason for participating, and there is clear respect and camaraderie in completing the task, but the politics and backgrounds of characters like Michael or Dwayne are far from that of Logan or Shawn. The implicit argument is that the damage from the fossil fuel industry is wide-reaching, and so the response should not and realistically cannot be limited to one group or ideology.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline also engages with criticism of this kind of direct action—characters point out that in the immediate aftermath oil sabotage will just make poor people pay more at the pump, and the likely “terrorist” brand they all face could overshadow their message—but manages to make the compelling case for sabotage in the face of failed prior actions. Some characters make the case for incrementalism and slow change, step by step, but as the film and reality show, although those might eventually work, time is running out to prevent widespread disaster.
Perhaps even more so than the book, the film makes a compelling case for this approach to the climate crisis. Both the urgency of the real-world situation and the crew’s taut filmmaking contribute to one of the best thrillers in recent memory. It’s a movie that might be able to get its message out to people outside of the environmental movement, which might be more important than ever as the time to prevent disaster ticks away.
