Legacy media outlets are putting out rave reviews about a recent film that glorifies terrorist attacks on critical infrastructure in the name of radical environmentalism.
The film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” which airs in theatres on April 14, was produced by the Oscar-winning company Elevation Pictures. It was first aired last year at the Toronto International Film Festival and also received an airing at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
According to director Daniel Goldhaber, the intention behind the film was to create “a big old propaganda piece.”
“I was very much in a place of anger and feeling very powerless and I was like, ‘Let’s make a big old propaganda piece,’” Goldhaber told the Associated Press, which called the movie an exploration of “vigilante eco-sabotage.”
The Globe and Mail recently branded the movie a “critic’s pick” with film reviewer Berry Hertz calling the movie a “gleeful provocation.”
According to a plot description, the film follows a group of young radical environmental activists in a heist as they prepare to sabotage an oil pipeline.
“It will quicken your pulse, raise your blood pressure and trigger your fight-or-flight response. And you’ll be a better, and a more entertained, person for it,” wrote Hertz.
“Is it controversial, even dangerous, to make a movie unambiguously urging illegal action? No more so than the thousands of films that squeal over wholesale murder or whose politics push the agendas of the American military,” he continued.
“Whether you walk out of it radicalized or not might say more about you than the film.”
The film was based on a nonfiction book of the same name by Marxist author Andreas Malm which argues for the use of sabotage and property damage for the purposes of advancing environmental goals.
As for the Rolling Stone, it called the film an ideal date movie.
“You’ll leave the theater buzzing as if from a shockwave, but also carrying a sense of how sexy the end of the world can be,” wrote the outlet.
