How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Director: Daniel Goldhaber
Year Released: 2022
Rating: 0.0
'Disaffected' young-ish individuals, including Xochitl (Ariela Barer, who also co-wrote the script), cancer patient Theo (Sasha Lane), Rowan (Kristine Froseth), Logan (Lukas Gage) and Alisha (Jayme Lawson) among others, come up with a plan to destroy a pipeline in West Texas to protest oil companies that are harming the environment. It's based on a non-fiction book by Swedish Marxist Andreas Malm and takes some of its ideas about sabotage and activism from there, but it's incompetently structured and does a choppy job showing how these people came to know each other or (with the exception of Theo) why they became so radicalized ... after all, it's one thing to go out and march, it's quite another to construct bombs. This is a rare instance where I agree with the sentiment - something must be done to protect the Mother Earth - but becoming domestic terrorists is not an option: while watching, I rooted against the principal characters, hoping they'd either get arrested or blow themselves up. There are several organizations that are doing their part when it comes to climate change (as of this writing) - most notably the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion (out of the U.K.) - and last I checked they did not advocate for violence as a solution.