How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Heralded as a throwback to the paranoid procedurals of the 1970s (as well as the tech noir thrillers of the 1980s), Daniel Goldhaber's tense, eco-terror polemic How to Blow Up a Pipeline also reveals structural and aesthetic debts to the more masculine wing of 90s cinema. While the piecemeal character introductions threaded throughout Goldhaber's film - which slowly shine a light on why these apparently disparate people are working towards a common goal - recall the staggered reveals seen in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, the polished, lockstep energy apportioned to these individuals and their nascent conspiracy is straight out of a Renny Harlin action film. Marcus Scribner's Shawn stomps around like one of Franco Nero's jarhead attaches in Die Hard 2; while Forrest Goodluck's Michael picks fights and rages, romantically, against the same snowy vistas as a Stallone. Goldhaber and editor Daniel Garber simmer their film in a tense (now retro) action syntax, one that Hollywood itself has almost completely abandoned. It's a fitting development. Not just because this particular method of communication lends itself well to hardscrabble plots and the delicate procedures required to animate them; it's the language of the American empire, at its peak, being turned back against its oily interests.