The cast and writing are matched by the rest of the craft. By the end, I would have believed this was based on a true story. At first, it felt forced to have such a wide range of people collaborating. There is a palpable chemistry in each individual connection as well as their group dynamic. This is one of the best young casts assembled in years with everyone at that place between up-and-comer and already arrived.
Some of that is the sharp writing - the character development is as tight as the action - but it’s also the actors. I cared deeply about each of these people. An action movie doesn’t work if you don’t care about the people. A heist movie doesn’t work if you don’t care about the people. The film is allowed to argue with itself through these characters, but they never slip into archetypes. Shawn then recruits Dwayne (Jake Weary), a Texas local whose land was taken away, and grungy couple Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage), seasoned ecoterrorists when they’re not on a bender. Xochitl teams up with her former classmate Shawn (Marcus Scribner), a doom-scrolling film student who wants to do something more meaningful, and Michael (Forrest Goodluck), an amateur bomb maker whose home in North Dakota has been overrun with oil workers. There’s Xochitl (Ariela Barer), a college dropout mourning her mother who died in a heat wave, her friend Theo (Sasha Lane), a young woman dying from a rare cancer caused by pollution, and Theo’s girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson), a do-gooder who’s the most skeptical of the group. There is nothing cheap here - except maybe its well-used indie film budget.Įach of the film’s characters represent a different background and a different perspective. All movies are propaganda, and sometimes explicitly political films can end up feeling cheap and manipulative. It does both these things really, really well. The genius of the adaptation is that it transposes these radical ideas into the entertainment of a heist movie and the pathos of a character study. But of course it had its detractors - as will this film. It was relatively well-received considering we live in a society that fetishizes pacifism. It’s a critique of non-violence in climate activism, a suggestion that destruction of property in pursuit of sabotage is not only morally justified but morally urgent.
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That manifesto, also titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline, was written by Andreas Malm and was published last year. It’s a fitting change for a movie based on a radical manifesto. It’s a fitting change for a film all about collective action. The opening credits of How to Blow Up a Pipeline state, “A Film By Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, and Daniel Garber.” This phrase, usually reserved for directors, here includes Goldhaber’s primary collaborators.
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