8/10 Swedish ecology professor Andreas Malm published “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” in 2021 as an examination of the history and philosophy of political violence and a criticism of both pacifism and climate fatalism within modern liberal politics. How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an abstraction, translating those themes into an onscreen narrative. It’s a serviceable heist movie made great by how well it captures the strange mood here at the cusp of the end of the world and what the people willing to change that actually look like.
West Texas- For various reasons mainly relating back to legalized land theft, pollution and enforcement of poverty, a group of eight disaffected youths independently conclude that the fossil fuel industry and all of its customers are destroying the world because it’s the cheapest thing to do and that sabotaging the entire supply chain to the point that it becomes too expensive to maintain is the only option. They come together to blow up a pipeline.
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