Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
Thumbnail for How to Blow Up a Pipeline trailer on YouTube. Elevation Pictures/YouTube
“We have to show how vulnerable the oil industry is, by hitting something big.”
Those are the words of an actress in the trailer for How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a new movie released by Elevation Pictures, the same people who produced Brendan Fraser’s The Whale and Everything Everywhere All At Once, both Oscar-winning films.
If only Wiebo Ludwig could have seen see this. The National Post’s obituary of him described him as an “eco-activist, convicted pipeline bomber.” Ludwig famously attacked oil and gas infrastructure near his farm near Beaverlodge. Alberta. The National Post wrote, “The late 1990s saw hundreds of acts of vandalism against the natural gas industry in northwest Alberta, many against AEC West, the company operating wells near Trickle Creek. In 1997, just days after the collapse of negotiations to buy Ludwig’s farm, explosions rocked two of the company’s wells 30km from the farm.
“Ludwig’s radical reputation created tension with neighbours, which reached a fever pitch after an early morning in June 1999, when a group of joyriding teens drove their trucks onto the lawn at Trickle Creek. Ludwig called 911, explaining shots had been fired at one of the trucks. Bullets hit two teens, including 16-year-old Karman Willis, who later died. At a community meeting in Beaverlodge the next week, angry residents spoke of lynchings.”
It seems Hollywood is taking a page from Ludwig, but going a lot bigger. The trailer shows a barrel bomb being attached to a 24 inch above-ground pipeline by a group of disaffected young people with a bone to pick with the oil industry.
“This is destruction of federal property. Terrorism,” says another actress in the trailer. An actors says, “If the American empire calls this terrorism, we’re doing something right.”
The YouTube trailer says it opened in theatres on April 7, but Elevation Pictures website says April 14. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10, 2022.
As a side note, when it comes to giving unhinged people bright ideas, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, appear to have been closely modelled on the plot of the Tom Clancy Novel Debt of Honor, a 1994 book. The conclusion of the book saw a bereaved airline pilot fly an empty but fully-fueled Boeing 747 airliner into the United States Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress, killing the president and nearly every member of Congress as well as the Supreme Court. Seven years later, 19 Al Qaeda terrorists attempted a very similar attack, with the last plane, United Flight 93, widely believed to have been targeted at the U.S. Capitol. It was brought down by its own passengers, who fought the terrorists for control of the plane.
Here’s that trailer:
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