How To Blow Up a Pipeline (FILM)

I hope you've heard about this movie before reading this post, because I'd hate to be responsible for spreading awareness of its existence. 

There's been a lot of buzz about the movie, from praise at the Milwaukee Film Festival to warnings from construction companies to increase their vigilance in the wake of the screenings. 

I wanted to see it for myself, to know if it was just another fabricated controversy, like Ozzie Osbourne leading your children to Satanism, or if there was actual meat on the bone. 

Sadly, the movie lives up to the warnings. 

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a film about a group of like-minded young people, who, at least on the surface, are united in their despair about global warming and ecological damage, to the point where they attempt to blow up a gas pipeline in Texas.  

I say "on the surface" because the rationale driving many of the characters is pretty threadbare. One character blames her illness on a refinery, and there's an angry Texan furious that his land was taken via eminent domain by an oil company. But the others just seem to gravitate to the project. One woman joins, despite opposing the plan, merely to appease her lover. 

At no point does the script appear to even care to explain their motivation in anything but the most cliche and superficial terms because the audience is presumed to accept their participation as a necessary and natural action. Unbelievably, in the context of the movie, we sort of do.  

The film as a whole is a propaganda piece uninterested in nuance or alternate views; when an  objection is made on screen, it is quickly and wholly dismissed as weak, cowardly, and insufficient to the matter at hand.  Terrorism, the group routinely states, is the only means of achieving the goal (though the overall goal remains strangely ambiguous - to inspire copycats, sure, but to what end?). The group proudly attaches the label of "terrorist" to themselves. After all,  so they muse, MLK and Jesus were terrorists, their violence was probably just forgotten after their success, right? 

All well and good if you agree on the problem, I guess. But there's nothing  on screen, no Grand Evil, that's *unique* to the climate crisis. I'd argue the same script could, with mild revisions, be used to present a film advocating the bombing of abortion clinics, livestock farms - or office towers in southern Manhattan. 

Now this isn't a documentary on bomb production. I'm sure you could find more information about that in 15 minutes online than you could gleam from the movie. No one is going to learn how to attack a pipeline from this, nor will it inspire a normal person to enlist in such an effort. 

Where the danger lies is this: as a movie, as a thriller, as a piece of entertainment, the film WORKS. It is well done and entertaining and most of the time you gloss over the dangerous rants because you're invested in the outcome. You walk away just a bit blase about the whole "terror" aspect. I'm not sure that's a good thing. 

SPOILER: I do think the final ten minutes of the movie, in which it devolves into a poor imitation of The Usual Suspects or Oceans 11 in an attempt to show just how much smarter the plotters are than law enforcement, nixes a lot of the goodwill the group has built with the audience. Fairy tale endings, devoid of any consequence for your actions, just don't ring true, and it drags the viewer abruptly out of the story. END SPOILER

I am a fierce defender of free speech, be it good or bad,  and not for one second do I think this shouldn't have been made or that it should be banned. 

But I do wonder at the wisdom of making it, and of the value of using art to encourage violence.