How To Blow up a Pipeline ★★★½ 

IN 2021 a non-fiction book by Andreas Malm caused a stir.

The book is a call to arms for environmentalists willing to commit crimes to get their message across.

It’s called called How to Blow Up a Pipeline and has now been adapted for the screen by a few like-minded individuals – director Daniel Goldhaber and his co-writers Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol.

Two things I should state first.

I have no idea whether any of the people named here have ever committed any vandalism and, secondly, I do not condone doing any.

That aside, the film is quite a tension-filled exercise, both in terms of the planning of the act and between the various personalities involved.

While the characters’ background stories are basically a hit list of all the environmental damage that can be caused to society, they still create believable person whom you care about.

One of the best sequences is where the young bomb maker tells the others to leave the room now because they have reached the section of the process where 50 percent of amateurs accidentally kill themselves.

Apart from the back stories it is interesting that the film doesn’t largely debate environmental issues and the ‘greater good’ argument.

Instead it focuses on telling a thrilling story and is a better film overall for doing so.