Post by Dracula on Jul 15, 2023 12:57:56 GMT -5
How to Blow Up a Pipeline(4/13/2023)
I would not necessarily call the film a complete apologia for eco-terrorism, as there are some arguments against what they’re doing presented and one sympathetic character who’s sort of meant to be the voice of non-violence in the room, but the film also isn’t condemning of the central action and is probably more sympathetic than unsympathetic on balance. Cards on the table, I’m not entirely comfortable with that. Attacking oil infrastructure while America and the world is still largely dependent on it is mostly a recipe for backlash and this particular attack would ultimately lead to an increased carbon footprint through increased transport by tanker truck rather than pipeline. Real change on this issue is going to involve a whole lot of electricity infrastructure, increased electric car production, and other boring reforms of the kind we’re getting out of the Build Back Better initiative and Inflation Reduction Act. That transition is in fact happening, so in a lot of ways the outlook expressed by these activists feels kind of like a dated relic of an earlier time when it really did seem like fossil fuels could still be the future, which at this point they’re pretty clearly not. As for the movie itself? Well, the “heist” proceadural aspects of it are not without interest but if that’s all you’re looking for this is no Ocean’s Eleven and the individual stories of all the activists are a bit of a mixed bag with some of them working better than others. There’s also kind of a lot of people the film has to cover in a pretty short amount of time so some of this feels rather abbreviated. I almost think this may have been better served as a TV show in which each person’s flashback could have been an episode sub-plot. There’s also a sub-plot involving FBI machinations that I don’t think really adds up. Ultimately this is an interesting enough production to be worth a look, but it could have been pulled off better and I don’t think I’m on board with its overall message.
*** out of Five
The new film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is labeled as an adaptation of the book of the same name by a Swedish professor named Andreas Malm, which is not a novel and is rather (as I’ve been told) a sort of nonfiction essay making the argument for sabotage and destruction of property as an acceptable tactic in climate activism. That’s not the kind of thing that would normally be adapted into a scripted narrative feature but, perhaps taking cues from Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation adaptation, director and co-writer Daniel Goldhaber has opted to sort of take the argument of that book and create a fictional story that sort of illustrates it by making a film about people who put those ideas into action. The resulting film as a heist movie of sorts that follows a group of activists who, for disparate reasons are plotting to blow up sections of oil pipelines in Texas in order to spike the price of gas and make fossil fuels less viable as an energy source. Along the way we get flashbacks to what led each of the activists in the group to this point; what radicalized each of them and how they became involved in the central group. The film’s cast is mostly populated by young actors who aren’t particularly recognizable outside of television and indie film and it’s shot on kind of cheap looking 16mm film stock in a way that’s kind of workmanlike.
I would not necessarily call the film a complete apologia for eco-terrorism, as there are some arguments against what they’re doing presented and one sympathetic character who’s sort of meant to be the voice of non-violence in the room, but the film also isn’t condemning of the central action and is probably more sympathetic than unsympathetic on balance. Cards on the table, I’m not entirely comfortable with that. Attacking oil infrastructure while America and the world is still largely dependent on it is mostly a recipe for backlash and this particular attack would ultimately lead to an increased carbon footprint through increased transport by tanker truck rather than pipeline. Real change on this issue is going to involve a whole lot of electricity infrastructure, increased electric car production, and other boring reforms of the kind we’re getting out of the Build Back Better initiative and Inflation Reduction Act. That transition is in fact happening, so in a lot of ways the outlook expressed by these activists feels kind of like a dated relic of an earlier time when it really did seem like fossil fuels could still be the future, which at this point they’re pretty clearly not. As for the movie itself? Well, the “heist” proceadural aspects of it are not without interest but if that’s all you’re looking for this is no Ocean’s Eleven and the individual stories of all the activists are a bit of a mixed bag with some of them working better than others. There’s also kind of a lot of people the film has to cover in a pretty short amount of time so some of this feels rather abbreviated. I almost think this may have been better served as a TV show in which each person’s flashback could have been an episode sub-plot. There’s also a sub-plot involving FBI machinations that I don’t think really adds up. Ultimately this is an interesting enough production to be worth a look, but it could have been pulled off better and I don’t think I’m on board with its overall message.
*** out of Five
