How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber
Written by Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, Daniel Goldhaber
Starring Ariela Barer, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, Marcus Scribner
Runtime: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Currently in theaters

by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t subtle, and  that’s a good thing. These characters are not trying to be subtle. The film isn’t trying to either. It wants you to walk out of the theater ready to start shit. It certainly worked on me!

Based on Andreas Malm’s nonfiction book of the same name—which doesn’t actually explain how to blow up a pipeline, only that property damage should be used as a protest tactic—Daniel Goldhaber’s film is a fictionalized story about a group of young people taking on the oil industry by, you guessed it, blowing up a pipeline. Creating a fictional narrative for this film works wonders, as it becomes a heist film, where the team has to be assembled (in flashbacks) and attempt to pull off their planned attack on a pipeline in West Texas.

As the film goes on, we see every character’s choice to join the team and what led them there. Xochitl (Ariela Barer–unrecognizable from the last time I’d seen her, as Gert in Marvel’s Runaways) is radicalized after her mother dies in a heat wave, and her friend, Theo (Sasha Lane), who grew up in the same area, joins as she’s facing health issues of her own. Shawn (Marcus Scribner) met Xochitl in a protest group in college, and they both agreed they want to take more radical action. 

Michael (Forrest Goodluck), an Indigenous man, is the first to start experimenting with homemade bombs, and you can feel his rage throughout the film. He’s the least concerned with legacy and most focused on sabotaging the people and industry who deserve it. There’s also Dwayne (Jake Weary), a Texan whose land was claimed by the government, and he’s able to find the right location for the titular pipeline to blow up. To round out the group, Alisha (Jayme Lawson) is Theo’s girlfriend, and Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage) are a couple and the more rambunctious partiers in the group.

The actors are all delivering, with standout performances from Ariela Barer and Forrest Goodluck. Their conviction throughout the film powers us through from scene to scene. I was excited to see Sasha Lane and Goodluck working together again in this film, as they were both great in The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018). There’s no weak link in the cast though, and it’s a testament to their work together that the group feels different from each other and all believable.

I really can’t stress this enough: This is an incredibly well-paced and well-edited film. No scene ever feels too long, and every switch to a character’s backstory fits in seamlessly. There’s a truly, well, explosive (sorry) cut in the last half that is as effective as it is funny. The writers (Barer, Goldhaber, and Jordan Sjol) really take advantage of the heist and action movie concepts to make this film entertaining and incendiary.

In an interview with MovieMaker, Goldhaber said, “There’s something provocative about using rhythms that are frequently associated with genre film and action film to tell a story that is about something so politically provocative and subversive.” That’s very much on display here, where the flashbacks function as a way to “get the team together” as you would in a heist flick, and the now timeline is the actual sabotage being put into motion. 

Because the film has so few scenes of the whole group talking about anything other than the plan, the scene where they get drunk and discuss how they’ll be portrayed in the media sticks out. Shawn’s “Jesus was a terrorist!” line is particularly funny, but Alisha’s point about the collateral damage of their stunt being poor people of color is also important. At least some of them seem very concerned about how society will view them and what the legacy of their attack will be. Michael, on the other hand, insists that if they’re called terrorists, “that means [they’re] doing something right.”

What stuck out to me most during this film is how much the characters show their nerves. Michael comments on Shawn looking nervous, but then his own hands shake in a later scene as he’s assembling the bombs. Throughout the film, pretty much all of the characters show some kind of anxiety (understandably) about pulling this off. But they move forward with the plan anyway, for one conviction or another. Some are doing this for philosophical reasons, and some are doing it for deeply, deeply personal ones. But they commit, and it works both as a typical getting-the-team-together moment and to depict the realities of who would be pulling off this kind of stunt—and how.

On the whole, this movie is a very effective heist movie that wants you to go commit your own heist once it’s over. The pacing and editing are stellar, and the actors are all doing great work. I encourage you to find this flick in theaters. And then maybe we can turn off our phones and make a plan of our own. If you’re reading this, US government, I’m just kidding!