An efficient thriller with eco-political ambitions, How to Blow Up a Pipeline details exactly that: the plotting and preparations of a disparate group of environmental activists to disrupt oil production in West Texas—something they describe as an “act of self defense.” While much of the early tension involves scenes of these self-taught bombmakers delicately handling explosive materials, director Daniel Goldhaber eventually complicates the narrative structure with intermittent flashbacks to each activist’s personal past, where we learn how climate change and/or fossil-fuel production has directly, traumatically impacted their lives. At times this feels like a too-neat way to put faces on a wide variety of environmental issues, but the individual performances are strong enough to make each narrative strand feel lived-in. (Forrest Goodluck is especially strong—numbly nihilistic—as a teen whose reservation in South Dakota has been taken over by oil fields.) Drawn from Andreas Malm’s nonfiction manifesto of the same name, How to Blow Up a Pipeline eventually sets aside the ethical debates its characters occasionally gesture toward to become its own political act, which feels somewhat at odds with the suspense trappings. It all might have worked better for me if Kelly Reichardt hadn’t made a far more sophisticated movie exploring similar concerns in 2014. Night Moves, starring Jessie Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard as an oddly matched trio plotting to sabotage a hydroelectric dam in Oregon, has a deeper, more artistically ambitious ambivalence—both in terms of its visuals and the handling of its characters.
(3/31/2023)
