A man scrolls through his social media feeds in a dimly-lit room. “It’s too late for prevention. Climate genocide is here,” reads one Tweet, citing new climate model data alongside a picture of a forest shrouded in smoke. “And that’s why I won’t be having kids,” reads a comment, while others urge not to give up yet, and still more argue that such discourse is irresponsible: After all, it’s big corporations, not individuals, who are responsible for 90 percent of pollution. What are we supposed to do?

This is a scene from How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a recently-released eco-thriller about a group of disenfranchised climate activists who, fed up with bureaucratic stalemates and shoulder-shrugging fatalism, hatch a daring scheme to make their voices heard. The plan? Strap homemade explosives to a West Texas oil pipeline, in order to expose the industry’s fragility, and to make a bold statement about a climate crisis that is rapidly approaching the point of no return.

The film takes its cues from Andreas Malm’s 2021 book of the same name, in which Malm—a noted climate scholar—argues that sabotage is among the last meaningful forms of environmental activism. Faced with a movement stunted by pacifism, his manifesto is an urgent call to action, encouraging individuals to force fossil fuel extraction to stop, by whatever means necessary—because, despite decades of protests, petitions, and peaceful demonstrations, the industry is booming, while sea levels, emissions, and temperatures continue to rise. The stakes are painfully high—and as one character, Xochitl (Ariela Barer), puts it in the film: “We need to start attacking the things that are killing us.”

“By giving its characters such reasons to put their lives on the line, and ensuring that they carry out the plan without causing other people harm, the film softens its messaging: Eco-terrorism is not for everybody, one might infer, but for those who have nothing left to lose.”

Directed by Daniel Goldhaber, How to Blow Up a Pipeline possesses the gripping tension and pulsing score of a classic heist movie, with a current of unrelenting desperation at its heart: The young people involved in this plot have each had their lives shaped by environmental disaster. Two of its protagonists, Xochitl and Theo (Sasha Lane) grew up next to a massive oil plant; Theo later develops a rare form of terminal cancer brought on by exposure, and Xochitl’s mother dies in a freak heat wave, crystallizing their motivations to do something drastic: a revolutionary act that might somehow move the needle toward change.

They recruit Michael (Forrest Goodluck), an Indigenous man from the Dakotas who—frustrated by the extraction of natural resources—spends his days picking fights with oil rig workers, or else making amateur bombs. Then there’s Shawn (Marcus Scribner), a film student who—fed up with doom-scrolling—teams up with Xochitil and Theo, taking on a supporting role in an environmental documentary project in the hopes he’ll meet someone who is willing to fight back. In the process, he encounters Dwayne (Jake Weary), a West Texas man whose family was displaced when oil companies sought to build more infrastructure in his area, and whose knowledge of the land proves essential in crafting a plan to exploit the system’s security. They all unite with a couple of anarcho-punks, Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage), who, albeit for slightly different reasons, are committed to the proposition of sabotage-as-salvation.

Perhaps the only character not sold on the approach is Theo’s girlfriend, Alisha (Jayme Lawson), who initially balks when she catches wind of their intentions, accusing Xochitl of “playing God” instead of doing the work through official channels. (She similarly bristles when they liken their actions to those of the Civil Rights Movement.) But while the film gestures at these ethical counterpoints, its ultimate narrative is one of heroism—made all the more tidy by the fact that, throughout the heist, the crew goes to great lengths to avoid actually hurting anyone, even debating the downstream impact of their actions. (“Okay, you scare a few oil companies, but what you’re really doing is fucking over poor people,” Alisha points out—to which Xochitl responds, “Better me than the people currently doing that… Pay more for gas now, or choke to death on hot air in five years.”)

“At the same time, the experience of its protagonists poses a question for the rest of us: How many degrees of separation are between you and such a radical act—and how might that change within your lifetime?”

In the wake of real-world catastrophes, like the 2022 Kansas oil spill—the largest onshore spill in nine years—How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an urgent call to action. But the straightforward explanations for its characters’ actions—childhoods colored by pollution, and the death of loved ones to climate-related causes—could be seen to dull its overall sentiment: a truly radical effort, Ben Kenigsberg argues in the New York Times, “wouldn’t go out of its way to concoct sympathetic motives, or to keep its plotting so clean.”

Many of the people involved in the film are direct victims of the climate crisis, and including these details makes its narrative more palatable to mainstream audiences: They are, after all, fighting back at a system that’s harmed them. But by giving its characters such reasons to put their lives on the line, the film softens its messaging: Eco-terrorism is not for everybody, one might infer, but for those who have nothing left to lose. At the same time, the experience of its protagonists poses a question for the rest of us: How many degrees of separation are between you and such a radical act—and how might that change within your lifetime?

In the end, the group decides—with little fanfare—that the violence of climate change necessitates similar violence as self-defense; and that appealing to the morality of the wealthy elite has, to this point, done little to turn the tides. The focus of the film is not on the implications of the team’s plan, but on its execution—and, in the end, its nail-biting cinematic approach is both its greatest strength and weakness, providing a pulse-pounding depiction of eco-terrorism, while only gesturing at the ideology underpinning it. Even so, How to Blow Up a Pipeline may be one of the most important movies of the year: a modern-day heist whose characters aren’t stealing cash, but the possibility of a better future.