Some movies and some reviewers are pernicious — a sad fact of this hyper-politicized age when the culture is divided against itself. Moviemakers who approach art as indoctrination are welcomed by pundits, whether in the trade press or the New York Times, who use reviews to enforce partisanship. Not everyone notices, but the new action-drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline makes this calamity undeniable.
The press promoting How to Blow Up a Pipeline has not been at all critical of its conceit, according to which several American activists plot to attack an oil conduit in Texas. Its title comes from a manifesto by Swedish activist Andreas Malm, published in 2021, which argued that sabotage and destruction of property are logical, justifiable actions to take against climate change.
Incredibly, even after the recent international incident in which the Nord Stream pipeline was exploded by saboteurs — a deed that remains an unsettled mystery, an ecological catastrophe, and a possible war crime — some reviewers are still willing to accept the dramatization of Malm’s barbarity as a variant of speculative fiction, all to show their support of “climate change” mania.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarkye references “climate scientists and activists,” that familiar unspecific corporate-media dodge. Then she reveals her bias: “Extreme weather occurrences are now part of our reality. In the face of this evidence, most governments have moved glacially to pass urgent legislation,” mixing her adverb and adjective, inciting and justifying Malm’s politics.
Variety’s Dennis Harvey places scare quotes around “eco-terrorism” to avoid offending goons. But at least Variety offered a demurral: The film “will nonetheless primarily appeal to viewers on the left side of the political dial.”
Bowing to the film’s ideology is a dereliction of journalistic probity as alarming as the film itself. Director Daniel Goldhaber is of the generation whose naïve politics form the basis of puerile meta-storytelling. (Goldhaber’s previous film Cam was a failed porn-movie exposé. His next scheduled atrocity is a remake of the Seventies shockumentary Faces of Death.) Goldhaber’s interest in mock outrage comes from progressive arrogance, exploiting today’s authoritarian death cult.
His narrative sorts the dilemmas of its various contemporary activists, telling their personal stories through flashbacks (a DIE exhibition of diversity, inclusion, and equity spread among whites, non-whites, men, women, pacifists, and radicals). All the actors have that desperate, proto-Antifa look of the politically brainwashed. You could spot their mugshots a mile away. Apparently Goldhaber (and mainstream reviewers) don’t remember Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), which exposed the lunacy of dangerous leftist activists.
Reviewers who praise this propaganda accept the characters’ threats: “I’m teaching myself to make a homemade blasting cap, my own improvised explosive device,” “If the American empire calls us terrorists, then we’re doing something right.” This goes against whatever ethics are left in film criticism. There’s a tendency among film journalists to go along with the liberal-activist mindset, in favor of on-screen dystopia. (Too much Marvel?) They cheer How to Blow Up a Pipeline as they cheered Paul Schrader’s foggy, reckless First Reformed, the cruelty of Parasite, the asinine Don’t Look Up, and the terrorist-chic of the post 9/11 film Day Night Day Night, about a suicide bomber in New York. This sociopathic filmmaking is the opposite of Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno, the rare movie to satirize progressive zealots.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is only notable for exposing Western media’s self-hatred. (“They will claim this is violence and vandalism, but this was justified. This was an act of self-defense,” one madman boasts.) Mindless reviewers relate to Goldhaber’s version of what Malm has called “diversity of tactics,” the depraved belief that a social movement should use force and violence for disruptive purposes — terrorism, not logical persuasion or nonviolence.
It’s crazy that our media support this destruction. The term “diversity of tactics” may as well be a boardroom, pitch-meeting phrase. How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t really a cautionary tale, it’s a bizarre, cold-blooded illustration of why we no longer trust our media.