What Shall We Blow Up?
Redheaded Dena (Dakota Fanning) and sensitive Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) nose around the massive, hydroelectric Green Peter Dam sluice gate in Oregon. She notes that there are no fish ladders. Dena’s a Connecticut-to-Pacific-Northwest refugee Trustafarian (a trust-fund kid who can afford to hang out on a Costa Rican beach, surf, smoke weed, wear blond dreadlocks, and pretend to be a Rastafarian—or run off and join the eco-terrorist movement, or Antifa, and so on). She works at a nature spa with wafting sauna steam and Indian flute music.
Josh is hired help at an organic farm. He’s a specific type of shrilly, moralizing, hypersensitive modern soft male; he puts bird nests back in trees with much agonizing, society-blaming, and verbal virtue-signaling. He also says (of the dam), “It’s killing all the salmon, so we can run our iPods.”
Then, Josh and Dena attend a documentary screening. In the Q&A, the filmmaker hails a green revolution. “What do you think we should do?” asks a student. The filmmaker replies, “One big thing is not good. Lots of little things are good.”
Oklahoma City Redux
But our two eco-warriors are clearly already up to something big. They meet up with Harmon, Josh’s activist buddy (Peter Sarsgaard at his edgy best in full-beard mode). Harmon is an ex-Marine and apparently an explosives expert. The dam keeps coming up in conversations.
Dena trust-fund bankrolls a $10,000 used speedboat. They trade 20-something Pacific Northwest eco-hippie revolutionary gossip: “Last I heard, Randy was squatting in Eagle Creek.” Dena waxes academic, stating that once the marine biodiversity goes, everything goes. They talk about the hydro dam: “Twenty-nine golf courses have sprung up in the high plains desert. Where’s the water coming from?”
Harmon speaks in the unctuous, sensual way of Gaia activists (with prior arrests). He paints the dam as a woman: “All that water pushing up against her walls, she wants to let go, but we need to help her.” There’s a pattern of anthropomorphizing man-made objects and being suspicious of them having ill intent toward nature.
It turns out that Harmon’s stockpiled a thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. They need 500 more to have some fun fireworks festivities. Problem is, if you order any amount over 10 pounds, this controlled substance sends up red flags to law enforcement.
Dena goes in the feed store, lays down an Oscar-worthy eco-improv, bamboozles the desk clerk, and bags bomb ingredients. They head home to jettison the boat seats and “stuff the turkey.”
It’s camping time, or rather, hanging around the campground picnic table looking like you’re camping, until night falls. Under cover of darkness, they take off across the camp lake. Pulling alongside the dam, Dena anchors the boat to it with an explosive, powder-actuated drill. Harmon wires the boat-bomb. Just as they’re about to high-tail it out of there, a car pulls up on the far bank. Dena says, “That’s not a good spot.” Will everyone make it out alive?
The local papers run the dam story; farmers talk. Dena breaks the agreed radio silence, wanting to know if Josh has seen a website for a missing Oregon airplane mechanic who was camping out on the river that night. All his friends, children, and mother are posting.
Dena’s got hives. She’s looking dangerously close to spilling the beans. Harmon thinks jail doesn’t sound too good. It’s life, plus 300 years.
Overview
This subject matter was pretty cutting-edge in 2013. Mark Ruffalo, Sean Lennon, and Yoko Ono were all protesting fracking. Things fall apart, the center does not hold, and that giant sucking sound is planet Earth’s vanishing resources. Therefore, this should be gripping and dramatic stuff, but mostly it isn’t.Generally, the film is too slow-moving. The music’s melancholy, echoey, like lake ripples, with sad piano chords. It’s appropriate, but it would have been nice to counter the overcast Oregon landscapes with some crackling dramatic tension. Sarsgaard brings that, Fanning a bit less so, Eisenberg not at all.
Unfortunately, while Eisenberg looks the part of a disgruntled eco-subversive, he possesses no deep-dug, tree-hugger taproot of dramatic power to be convincingly attention-grabbing—he just looks mildly disturbed. Sighs a bit. You just don’t care enough about him one way or another.
The film does bring up a good point. Sometimes, those caring about roadkill deer enough to dynamite a dam are self-righteous and zealous to the point of strangely lacking compassion for fellow humans.
“Night Moves” clearly shows the dangers of youthful idealists trying their hand at revolution. When walking the walk results in a foot getting blown off by an improvised explosive device, there’s immediate PTSD and the realization that one is not a real warrior. The movie spotlights the overly passionate, not-well-thought-through, roiling fanaticism that pervades much of modern revolution.
But is it perhaps also something else? Is it a call out for real eco-warriors to man up? One gets the distinct feeling that the filmmakers support anti-corporation and pro-environment ideology. The Oregon area in which the film is set is rife with organic farming communities, and 1960s-style back-to-the-land and off-the-grid neo-hippies, anarchists, radicals, and activists. Was “Night Moves” a subversive call to arms?
