How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)

 

Spoilers ahead.

The end credits of this film include a claim that it is inspired by Andreas Malm's book of the same title.  The book's full title is How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire.  Some people started calling Malm a "terrorist" for writing this book, as if he's ever done anything terroristic other than gently suggest it to others.  His book argues that some illegal acts of property destruction can and should be used, in a strategically targeted way, by political activists in the movement seeking climate justice and mitigation of climate change.

This is to say that this is a self-consciously political movie.  I've seen at least one person who said "agree with the group or not, the movie doesn't care and isn't about that," which is absurd.  It's true the filmmakers claimed influence from Ocean's Eleven and the film follows many conventions of the heist thriller genre; but in interviews, they say that they intended to use the model of populist entertainment to reach people. 

You get critics saying it's successful as a political polemic, that they respect Daniel Goldhaber's stated ambitions to "disseminate an idea that has been generally taboo to discuss in public" and "push the culture in a particular, political direction."  Some even call it an "instruction manual" or a "powder keg."  I have two responses to this.

First, if the police ask to speak with you, ask them if you're free to go, and if they say yes, leave.  If they say no, make an unambiguous statement that you want to speak with a lawyer and will not talk to them.  If you are arrested and brought in for questioning by the police, and the police promise you a lighter sentence if you help them in an investigation, they are lying.  They are allowed to falsely tell you they can do that, but the only enforceable negotiations you can make to lighten a sentence are with prosecutors pursuing a plea deal.  

Second, if a stranger asks you to commit a crime, you generally shouldn't do it.  I don't know why I have to say this.  You may find yourself conspiring with an undercover law enforcement officer.  This is in fact very close to what happens in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and is one major difference between this film and Ocean's Eleven.  Most of the characters in Ocean's Eleven already know each other by the time they come together to prepare their heist, and all of them are career criminals.  The characters in How to Blow Up a Pipeline are strangers to each other.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline starts with the characters already together, then periodically shows us flashbacks explaining why each of them became involved with the group.  I say "why" rather than "how" because these flashbacks all explain their motives, but they mostly become involved in the same way: a random stranger asks them to commit a crime, and they decide to go along with it.  Three of them, Xochitl, Theo, and Alisha, know each other before the crime.  One character, Michael, is recruited by Xochitl when she sends him a direct message in response to one of his videos about how to build IEDs. 

You shouldn't respond respond to strange DMs asking you to build bombs for the sender, and you probably shouldn't post videos of yourself building them either. 

One of the group, Rowan, is actually an FBI informant.  She becomes one after being arrested for trying to sabotage the federal government's attempt to construct a dam.  When she is interrogated by the FBI, an agent tells her that a lawyer cannot help her, and the only way she can help herself is by cooperating with an investigation.  

Again, any promise made to you by a law enforcement officer of a lighter sentence a lie.  But you wouldn't learn this from How to Blow Up a Pipeline, because Rowan not only gets let off, but gets paid. 

In a twist, it turns out the information Rowan was feeding to the FBI was false, intended to take the heat off of most of the bomber group and convince the law and the world that only Xochitl and Theo, who willingly give themselves up, were responsible for the whole thing.  If, in a movie like Ocean's Eleven or Mamet's Heist, someone actually did get out of a prison sentence by negotiating with an arresting officer, I probably wouldn't mind it.  None of the above will matter much to people find this film effective as a crime thriller.  

But other people like this movie because it flatters their political sensibilities.  By "flattering their sensibilities," I don't mean agreeing with them, I mean adopting facile ideas about how to accomplish things and find like-minded people.  A self-proclaimed political, activist movie, attended by press tours with the filmmakers saying stuff like this, should not have this shit in it.

In any case, it's not an effective crime thriller.  Even if I suspend my disbelief and accept that in this film's fantasy world, FBI agents can legally ensure lighter sentences in exchange for cooperation, I have no idea why the agents would have believed what Rowan told them.  They always seem suspicious of her, and we don't even know what exactly she says to them.  Did the FBI have no idea who Michael was despite his online broadcasts about building bombs?

Before I saw this film, I read one person's opinion complaining that it was dull, the characters lacked depth, and that critics' positive reception of this film was a "critical (and moral?) failing" because they only promoted it for its politics.  I found this obnoxious.  First of all, never put adjectives in parentheses, especially not with a question mark.  Second, I've never been convinced by such melodramatic hand-wringing about film criticism.  So, I reacted by trying to like this film.  But I have to concede it's just kind of dull.

The conversations are punctuated with characters awkwardly blurting out bits and pieces of their ideology and the actual crime is so simple that watching it doesn't inspire the same kind of interest other heist movies do.  It tries to build suspense by cutting directly from high-stakes twists to the flashbacks, but the flashbacks are so paint-by-numbers that this is more annoying than suspenseful.  And when we return to the main timeline, we find that most of the twists resolve themselves without incident.  The characters get over it almost immediately and move on to the next thing.

I keep seeing people saying that even if the movie isn't quite what they wanted, or if they don't totally love the source material, we should still support and appreciate this film for trying to move the Overton window of popular filmmaking.  We should be happy about the fact that a movie will represent these characters the way Ocean's 11 represented its characters.  I disagree.  We live in a world where Law and Order exists, alongside innumerable similar TV shows, films, true-crime podcasts, and recordings of lurid police interrogations.  If the character in this film were real, they would probably say all this is "copaganda."  But not in this script.

Other political critiques of this film criticize its marketing, its sources of funding, and the filmmakers' consultation with someone "very high up in the United States military."  I didn't even know these things until after I watched the film and it was still obvious to me that it was a sham.