In this radical and thought-provoking thriller, a motley group of environmental activists decide to fight back against a devastating and brutal climate change by any means necessary. The plan: plant improvised explosive devices at a West Texas oil refinery that has a horrific history of devastating environmental pollution and human rights violations.
Daniel Goldhaber delivers a tense 103-minute plot about a terrorist plot that the group euphemistically refers to as “the project” and also uses an elegant flashback structure to fill in the backstory and lives of these eco-terrorists trying to figure out what you’re doing. These are the people whose health, future, and homes have been destroyed by the intervention of the US government on behalf of the powerful oil companies; and that’s before you get to the more serious global effects of global warming.
This is a messy group. A young native (Forrest Goodluck) is angry at the destruction of his reservation due to the construction of an oil pipeline. And there’s a gun rights conservative whose family land in West Texas has been confiscated by the federal government (Jake Weary). How to blow up a pipeline? he may venture into didactics with his impassioned roaring twenties rhetoric, but he allows his characters to be ambiguous enough not to turn them into stumped “guys”. Balancing its provocative ideas with the knife’s literal fear that the whole thing might explode in her face, this heist thriller is (kind of) captivating and powerful. Goldhaber uses fast zooming and quick editing to emphasize not only the urgency of the events, but also their extreme DIY nature: there is nothing clean or smooth about it.
How to blow up a pipeline? wants more than sensationalism: his reflections on the ethics of violence are rare in modern independent cinema. Although it is a fictional story based on a book by the Swedish academic Andreas Malm, it is not a movie with a big theory: it is about people’s radical actions without acceptable channels. Because courtesy and rule keeping have long since become useless in the face of apocalyptic greed and power.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.