How to blow up a Pipeline review: Vital but underdeveloped climate drama
Headlines about how doomed we all are due to climate change have sadly started to have less of an impact, as we all get more fatigued by the endless bad news. Thankfully, creatives have been trying to make the same points in different ways. Netflix satire Don’t Look Up imagined the life of a beleaguered scientist trying to convince people to stop their destructive ways, and now How To Blow Up a Pipeline is the latest plea for change, via a set of fictional characters intent on blowing up an oil pipeline to violently disrupt the status quo.
It’s a fast moving, great-looking film that jumps about with intriguing haste, using interesting camera work, and storylines to capture well the urgency with which these protestors are trying to force change. We meet a varied set of characters from across America who have been affected by climate change: some have become ill due to infected water systems, others hurt while protesting, doing climate change action, others displaced as their homes are bulldozed to make way for new oil pipelines.
There’s a strong set of performances that are a fair match to the artsy camerawork and ambitious production style, which has us whizz back in time every ten or fifteen minutes to get another origin story about one of the protestors. Lukas Gage, fresh from White Lotus, is particularly fun as a punk from Portland.
The atmosphere feels less believable, mainly because it’s hard to escape how random the premise – a group of strangers coming together to blow up a pipeline – feels. It’s just quite hard to buy into the story when the plot, and particular set of protestors, feels rather plucked out of thin air, with little justification given to why the film-makers have chosen this very specific style of climate action to focus on. (They aren’t plucked out of thin air, this is a film adaptation of a book, but nevertheless, the point stands.)