Review of How To Blow Up A Pipeline

It would be facetious, and also factually wrong, to complain that this film does not tell you how to blow up a pipeline. It's got a lot of specific detail in it, including the requirement to make sure that the explosive is quite close to the pipe itself, which is very strong. The film's protagonists find making detonators the most difficult part, and this involves both chemistry and electronics work. The explosive itself seems to be old-fashioned sugar and weedkiller, and though they bash it about quite a lot as they move the oil drums in which they've packed it, it doesn't go off. 

I haven't read any terrorist (or urban guerrilla, if you prefer) memoirs, but I suspect that there isn't a great deal in them about the nuts and bolts of bomb-making. Perhaps if there was then the crew in the film wouldn't have made such heavy weather of it. Can't help thinking that the IRA had an easier time...perhaps because they had access to supplies from supportive governments?

Most of the film is like a heist movie...about the individuals' back-stories, and about the preparations and mechanics of the operation itself, with tension supplied by unexpected appearances and so on...there's another thing but I won't talk about that because I don't want to commit a spoiler.

Nice that one of the gang is a conventional Texas farmer who looks like he would have been at home in the Tea Party or storming the Capitol, and who has been radicalised by the compulsory purchase of his family farm for the pipeline.

The author of the eponymous book, Andreas Malm, is said to have a walk-on part somewhere in the film, but I didn't see him.

In its own terms it's quite gripping, though I haven't thought much about it afterwards. There's not much political discussion or reflection about the tactic of sabotage and how it might relate to a wider movement, and what there is not very thoughtful.

Worth watching though - how many films about climate activists are there?

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill, via informal distribution.