Wow.
This is a film that doesn't forget that it should be entertaining, by way of an ensemble group that, with its somewhat motley group of characters (though also not), you sympathize with and understand where they're coming from; yes, even the ones who have more typical Anti-Fa motives, though more-so those who have been abandoned and told to fuck off by systems that don't care. Well... some of them (or Michael most of all) Don't Care right the fuck back at you!
And as actors, this group is wholly believable in large part because we haven't seen them in a lot of things (Lukas Gage and maybe Sasha Lane an exception but only then to select in the know audiences). You just see these men and women come together with this common goal, and it all seems... right and just in that radical way that Battle of Algiers was too (that was name-dropped by the director in an interview so thats why I'm citing it here, but it makes sense).
But while the filmmakers have methodical attention to the processes that these characters are in, and create genuine suspense (and a legit twist-reveal that I'm not sure I've seen before in a "Heist" type of movie, if you want to classify this as and it easily can be), it's about something urgent and dire which is, well, the corrosion and destruction of the planet by Capitalists and the machine that enables them. Moreover, what's so engrossing about How to Blow Up a Pipeline is that this plan, we know, won't solve everything (it can't, realistically), but it doesn't come off like some pyrrhic achievement either. You have to do *something* sometimes!
It's a story of the process- and holy damn, do I love when a good step by step presentation is done, electric wire threaded to A to B and then roll the barrel to C etc, of how a plan unfolds, sprinkling in the backstories where it is in this case wholly necessary and is not (as it could have been) hackneyed but always enhances the experience of how much we want these broken, depressed, radicalized and, yeah, revolutionary figures to succeed (or not fuck it up, and of course there is a scene where they discuss if they are revolutionary or what that means, and it's humanizing in a way, like how... these people would talk when blowing off steam before the big event).
And, without saying too much about what happens, the filmmakers do some inspired things to keep the audience guessing and on their toes on both macro and micro levels: will the thing go off when person A gets the attention of B so BOOM can occur? And will they... not. Get. Caught?
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, above all else, is honest and unapologetic in its direction and writing, in giving us these people, with enough explanation but stripped to what we need to see - Melville also comes to mind actually now that I think of it - and letting the audience make up their minds about what's happening and going on, and a lot of that, again, is due to how great the casting is of the likes of Ariela Barer, Jake Weary, and particularly Forest Goodluck come off moment to moment and in sum. This is ultimately so thrilling because it's about vigilantism where it implicates the audience, is nakedly political, and asks "well... yeah!"
To put it another way, I searched for the title on Youtube to check out some interviews and such post viewing, and there's a Fox 'News' segment about how it glorifies eco-terrorism. Maybe if Fox is putting a segment criticizing, they're... doing something right?
