What a title! Pitching this movie to investors must have made financing How to Blow Up a Pipeline pretty easy. That means Daniel Goldhaber’s trickiest task is translating a book about protest theory into a narrative film, without resorting to excessive preachiness. Thankfully Goldhaber thought his story through, and gives us a great modern thriller with purpose, a potent recipe for movie success.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline jumps right in as a bunch of random people start showing up to an empty house in West Texas. One group is Xochitl (Ariela Barer), her best friend from home Theo (Sasha Lane), Sasha’s girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson), and their college friend Shawn (Marcus Scribner). Group #2 is West Texas native Dwayne (Jake Weary) and amateur explosives expert Michael (Forrest Goodluck). And group #3 is anarchist loose cannons Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage). This hodgepodge of young seemingly random people, as you might expect, has come together for a purpose: to take down an oil pipeline to send a message to the oil companies.
Behinds the scenes almost mirrors what the audience is watching with How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Daniel Goldhaber’s story framework, preparation, and planning is a great recipe for success. The movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline is framed more like a heist movie with a ticking clock, which immediately puts the audience on edge as these clear novices try to execute their plan. We meet all our cast with their minds made up and in the middle of the action, as the audience tries to piece together who these people are. Tension then builds to these series of little cliffhangers where the audience is clutching their armrest…and that’s when Goldhaber inserts one of the character’s backstories. Those backstories do a lot of heavy lifting: they reframe the story we’ve been watching in a new context, they give each actor a chance to showcase their acting chops, and they ramp down the tension for Goldhaber to build it back up and move the plan to the next phase. The real time execution of pipeline destruction is completely details focused, which keeps the groups’ goals simple but complicated in execution, naturally amping up the tension. Goldhaber has you so focused on these little mini obstacles that he also finds time to layer in other future obstacles the team will have to deal with, which lead to some great plot twists you probably won’t see coming. How to Blow Up a Pipeline feels like an incredible combination of The Wages of Fear and Hell or High Water, two great films that Daniel Goldhaber’s movie earns mentioning in the same sentence through the clever behind the scenes work and planning.
Maybe the trickiest problem How to Blow Up a Pipeline has to tackle is how to get the book’s message across without bogging the movie down into self-righteous preachiness. Again, this is where writer director Goldhaber shines. He takes the theory the book suggests and gives pieces of that theory to each of the characters, so the messaging comes out naturally instead of through some preachy voiceover or stat on the screen. Similarly, each character has a different but harmful experience with the oil industry which pushes them to this drastic plan, including as the cast shows an overrepresented number of minorities. The characters varied backstories lead to some really fascinating potent conversations about terrorism, the United States, and systems of power that walk the tricky line of giving the audience a lesson without beating the audience over the head with it.
So by the end of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, you feel this complicated sense of exhaustion, satisfaction, and sadness. At the end of the day, these kids’ actions are temporary, and the oil money is going to keep the system moving forward. But maybe, just maybe, everyone’s actions here inspire new people to rise up and defender their home/lifestyle/loved ones from the toxic effects of a system that takes from the helpless and serves the rich. I personally hope too How to Blow Up a Pipeline leads to the Goldhaber universe of movies where the concepts here are applied to other heist movies in problematic industries. Can’t wait!