How To Blow Up a Pipeline is an effective film in more ways than one. Not only is it a tense, terse, small-budget heist-style thriller, more indebted to Reservoir Dogs than An Inconvenient Truth, it's also a subtle— if entirely unintended—indictment of the climate movement's violent fringe activists.
Adapted from Andreas Malm's 2021 nonfiction polemic of the same name, How To Blow Up a Pipeline isn't a step-by-step guide to destroying oil company property, but rather a depiction of what it would take for a small group of climate radicals to build and detonate explosives intended to block the flow of oil, driving up the price of fossil fuels, and—they hope— inspiring copycats who will further increase the cost of business as usual for the fuel industry.