Sock It to Me

If this is incoherent I apologize, I just finished How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which I picked up from the library on a whim earlier today, and it was excellent. It's, as it sounds, about a group of environmental activists who try to blow up an oil pipeline.

That premise may put some people on edge, but the movie does a fantastic job of digging into each individual's reason for being a part of this. None of them are just hellraisers; they all feel like they have skin in this game, and they are portrayed quite sympathetically. They're a diverse group too, in every sense. This isn't a group of friends who came up with this plot together; this is a group of ideologues driven by a powerful sense that sabotage of the oil industry is the only way for humanity to survive. To me, this makes them even more interesting. They are not ride or die for each other because they like each other--they're ride or die for each other because they have a mission. 

The whole film is a masterclass in establishing and maintaining tension; I was on the edge of my seat from start to finish. It is, in most ways, a heist thriller. And heist thrillers, though we love them, can only go so many ways. Yet the way How to Blow Up a Pipeline works with its timeline and the gradual feeding out of information to the audience works to keep you riveted the entire runtime. It manages twists without feeling like it's yanking the rug out from under you or deus ex machina-ing it to make things work. There are so many things that could go wrong, obviously, and the movie keeps tension in all of these moments without dragging or feeling repetitive. It also excels at showing how much work these protagonists have to put in, from knowledge acquisition like teaching themselves to build explosives to managing a dozen alibis to the physical labor of setting this whole thing up.

It also drives home how desperate I think many of us feel about the climate crisis. We may not be ready to blow up a pipeline, but many of us would at least not really disapprove of someone who did. The film does not fall prey to simply goading on destruction to stick it to the oil execs though; there are many moments when the real stakes of the climate crisis are put on display, and while our protagonists may have moments of celebrating their efforts, for the most part we feel that they would rather not being doing any of this. They would rather it had not come to this. As a result, there is a sobering grief that underlies much of the anger and bombast in the film: grief for what has been done to the environment, for what people have already suffered as a result, for the future that many young people feel has been slowly stolen from them over generations of environmental abuse. 

Overall a fantastic movie; I would definitely watch this again.