If you type the name of this film into Google, it is not impossible that someone from the FBI or some other American agency will knock on your door (or rather break it down), and Daniel Goldhaber’s radical environmentalist thriller is really a dynamic and exciting film about a group of young people who decided on that radical move. This film had its premiere at the Toronto festival, and Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw noted that Goldhaber’s style model was Quentin Tarantino’s cult “Reservoir Dogs”. And there we follow a group of ten people who decided to blow up a gas pipeline in Texas, and in parallel, while we follow their activities in that action, through flashbacks we learn about their background stories and the motives that made them decide to take that step.
And mostly these are angry young people who feel completely powerless because of everything that is happening around them and they don’t want and can’t just sit around and argue that something has to change. They decided to take action and believe that their radical move will encourage others to wake up, and they are well aware that they will be considered terrorists, and therefore they must work out their plan very well. Theo (Sasha Lane from American Honey) and the young Indian woman Xochtil (Ariela Barer is also the co-writer of the film) are best friends who grew up in Long Beach, California, one of the most polluted cities in America and home to countless oil refineries.
After Xoxhtil’s mother dies suddenly, and Theo learns that she suffers from leukemia, they will decide on a revenge campaign. They will include Thea’s partner Alisha (Jayme Lawson) in the action, and they will connect with five more radical environmental metalists from all over America. Michael (Forrest Goodluck) is a young explosives expert furious that the oil industry is irrevocably changing and destroying his ancestral land. Dwayne (Jake Weary) is an angry family man from Texas, seething after the government confiscated his land for the construction of a gas pipeline, and Shawn (Marcus Scribner) is a documentarian who is tired of just watching and recording the injustice that happens. Logan (Lukas Gage) and Rowan (Kristine Froseth) are activists and anarchists who regularly participate in such actions.
Goldhaber found inspiration in Andreas Malm’s book of the same name, which is also a kind of manifesto for all similar radical activists, something along the lines of William Powell’s “Anarchist Cookbook” from the early seventies. It is an extremely interesting, exciting and dynamic film, shot in a slightly retro style with a retro camera, and not only does it all seem extremely realistic and real, but “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is one of those films in which the protagonists regardless who commit something that is undoubtedly a criminal act, we cannot consider them classic villains. All of them have their own motives that we will understand until the end, and everything they do is shown almost observationally, and not only does this film offer a lot to think about, but it also hides many surprises.