‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ Trailer: Neon’s Environmental Thriller Is Off the Rails

Ryan Lattanzio
·2 min read
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“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” provides one answer on how to solve climate change: Destroy the perpetrators.

The 2022 TIFF breakout film follows a group of environmental activists who are determined to dismantle an oil pipeline in West Texas. The thriller, helmed by Daniel Goldhaber, is described part high-stakes heist, part radical exploration of direct action as climate activism in the official logline.

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“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is based on the controversial nonfiction book by Andreas Malm, and stars Ariela Barer (“Runaways”) who also produced and co-wrote the feature with Jordan Sjol. “Euphoria” and “You” Season 4 breakout Lukas Gage, “Sharp Stick” actress Kristine Froseth, Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane, Jayme Lawson, Marcus Scribner, and Jake Weary also star.

IndieWire spoke with screenwriter and star Ariela Barer, who devised the heist movie with Jordan Sjol and Daniel Goldhaber over the course of half a year during the deep days of the pandemic. The movie’s mainly Gen Z cast is a sobering reminder of the vastly philosophically different attitudes and degrees of hopelessness toward environmental collapse that different generations have.

“We were all to varying degrees, dissatisfied with the world in our lives, and we felt incredibly disempowered and just you know, how we can affect the world. And this book kind of came onto our lap,” she said. “We all just kind of became obsessed with it. It was so just invigorating. It felt like it put a fire in us again.”

She added, “Our worldviews were shaped by very different eras. And that was an important dialogue that we had as we wrote it.”

Barer also said she was inspired, uniquely, by “climate change panic attacks” she started having as a young child. “I was so nihilistic. My teenage rebellion became caring about the world.”

Outside of her own personal coming-of-age angst, Barer tapped into researching real-life environmental protestors.

“Even with all of the research that we did in this movie, it got dark,” she said. “You’re reading about the horrors of the world and the people you cannot hold accountable.”

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” premieres April 7 in theaters.

Check out the trailer below.

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