It’s a charged word, terrorism. It’s unsettling, challenging, alarming. And this is something that Daniel Goldhaber’s propulsive eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline smartly acknowledges. Even on the eve of a radical act of violent protest – the destruction of two sections of Texas’s oil infrastructure – some of the environmental activists behind the plan are reluctant to use the term. Rowan (Kristine Froseth), a 22-year-old from Portland, Oregon, prefers to think of herself as a “revolutionary” or “gamechanger”. Other members draw parallels with the Boston Tea Party or the civil rights movement. But Theo (Sasha Lane), a young woman from a poisoned suburb of Long Beach, California, is under no illusions. “They’re gonna call us terrorists. Because we are doing terrorism.” Her terminal cancer diagnosis, the consequence of a childhood growing up in the shadow of an oil refinery, means that Theo is done with tiptoeing around the truth, however unpleasant it might be.
