104 min | R | April 7, 2023 | Neon
Eight young radicals meet in the West Texas desert with a plan to blow up an oil pipeline. Daniel Goldhaber turns Andreas Malm’s theory into a lean heist movie that takes its title at its word. It does not argue the politics so much as hand these kids a detonator and watch.
A cell of young people gathers in the West Texas desert to destroy a section of oil pipeline. Each one arrives carrying a private injury inflicted by the fossil fuel industry. The film unfolds as a heist. The crew assembles the bomb in the present while flashbacks reveal who these people are and what pushed them from protest to sabotage. The premise is provocative on its face, but the film treats property destruction as a tactical question rather than a thrill. This is a procedural about radicalization that builds its tension from competence and consequence.
Ariela Barer plays Xochitl as the organizer who recruits the cell and keeps it moving. She carries the grief that radicalized her without ever lecturing the camera. Forrest Goodluck plays Michael, the one who builds the device, with a coiled anger aimed at the oil industry encroaching on his land. Sasha Lane plays Theo with a fatalism that reads as freedom, and Jayme Lawson plays Alisha as the partner who follows her into danger out of love rather than belief. Lukas Gage and Kristine Froseth play Logan and Rowan as a couple whose nerve and loyalty get tested at the worst moment. Marcus Scribner plays Shawn, the friend who connects these activists to one another.
Daniel Goldhaber directs from a script he wrote with Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol, turning Andreas Malm’s book of theory into a working thriller. The smartest decision is structural. The film cross-cuts the assembly of the bomb in the present against the flashbacks, so each backstory arrives at the moment its character faces a choice. The grainy handheld photography keeps the desert tactile and the threat close. The sound work treats the chemistry of the explosives with procedural patience, every poured measurement and stripped wire shown in real time. The score tightens the pulse without smothering the fear in the room.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline understands that the heist is the right shape for this argument. The form demands competence, planning, and risk, and it makes the audience want the plan to work. Goldhaber never asks whether these people are correct. He asks what it costs them to act and whether that cost is the point. The film takes a phrase designed to frighten people and turns it into a set of human faces with reasons. That is a harder and more honest thing than a polemic, and the movie delivers it.