Digger

Alejandro G. Iñárritu and his frequent writing collaborators, Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris Jr., are back with a perplexingly pointless polemic. Tom Cruise stars as an aging oil magnate named Digger Rockwell whose careless company accidentally dislodges a giant ice shelf from Greenland, where he's extracting crude, launching the environmentally devastating projectile toward Europe. The incompetent and sickly US President (John Goodman), his spineless VP (Michael Stuhlbarg), the Defense Secretary (Burn Gorman), and various other officials scramble to come up with a plan, not to stop the catastrophic event, but to make sure they're not held entirely responsible. At least that's the initial setup, but the movie has several twists and reveals that make it seem like it has more up its sleeve.

I think this film is meant to be a political satire. But when satire is written by people who don't understand humor, they become the joke. As with many of Iñárritu's films, Digger is co-scripted by Mexican writer and journalist Sabina Berman from a story by Berman, Iñárritu, and the English playwright, screenwriter, and director Jez Butterworth (co-writer of Fair Game, Edge of Tomorrow, Spectre, Ford v Ferrari, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). With all those folks bashing away at the script, you'd think one of them might point out that satire, while it doesn't need to be subtle, can't be too on-the-nose or it ceases being satire and becomes a tirade. But Iñárritu has always been more interested in playing with form and cinematic structures than using them to make nuanced thematic points. This isn't a problem in movies like The Revenant or Birdman, which aren't trying to make grand statements about the future of humanity.

The film tries to do a lot and say a lot as it progresses, but instead of deepening its themes and narrative, the writers' onion-peeling structure robs each layer of meaning and makes the visual approach absurd. Digger plays out in a few different realities, but one conceit it most assuredly does not utilize is the idea that much of what we see unfold is happening in the mind of its titular protagonist, the way Birdman does. Because of this, the way most of the movie is shot makes very little sense once you come to understand what you're actually watching. In trying to create something spectacularly cinematic, the filmmakers violate the reality they slowly reveal. They also undercut the dramatic stakes of their drama to a disastrous effect. They seem to realize this, so they add the wildly out-of-place convention of a child in jeopardy for Cruise's character to worry about constantly, as if some character we never see is supposed to make us feel like something really is at stake for this person. It doesn't. It's a distraction with a very weak payoff.

One thing that isn't weak is Tom Cruise's performance, which is, of course, delivered with the full Cruise commitment we've come to expect from this actor/producer. But it's exhausting. Cruise is more than capable of creating nuanced, multifaceted characters who operate on more than one energetic level. And he's the man who created Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder and Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia. I love those performances, but there's a reason those guys are only on screen for a small percentage of their respective movies' running times. We don't need a whole Les Grossman or Frank T.J. Mackey movie, or if we do, we'd want them to be developed into more multidimensional characters than we see in those pictures (and I don't mean give them an unseen daughter whose life might be in danger). Spending 129 minutes with Digger Rockwell is arduous, and even when we discover key information about Cruise's character, it doesn't make him any less exhausting or any more complex.

It might help if the supporting cast offered any relief, but everyone else in the film is also hitting the same flat note over and over and over again. Goodman is especially tedious. There are films like Raising Arizona, Sea of Love, The Big Lebowski, Argo, and Inside Llewyn Davis where you're thrilled every time John Goodman comes back on screen. Then there are films like Masked and Anonymous, King Ralph. Trumbo, and, in my opinion, Barton Fink, where you just want his scenes to be over with. Digger falls in the latter camp. Gorman and Stuhlbarg are equally grating, as is Riz Ahmed as Digger's head of Environmental Safety. Sandra Hüller, Sophie Wilde, and Jesse Plemons are along for the ride but add little to nothing.

The central set-piece of Digger sees the eponymous billionaire tycoon give a fiery speech before the European Parliament in which he accepts responsibility for the disaster he's caused but argues that his company should be blamed for society's dependence on oil. It's a tour de force performance, equally well-staged and well-photographed. Too bad the writing is so flimsy. This is the kind of monologue that's meant to evoke the great rants of cinema, such as Ned Beatty's "You Have Meddled With the Primal Forces of Nature" speech in Network. But where Paddy Chayefsky's writing makes your jaw drop as you're trapped between howling with laughter and realizing the character's words are probably far more truthful than you could have imagined before he started to speak, Iñárritu and company only manage to dull the sharp point of their character's argument with each additional minute he grandstands. Yes, to a certain extent, we are all responsible for the dysfunctional state of contemporary society, but, Alejandro, some folks are a tad more responsible than the rest, and it's difficult not to take this central monologue as little more than a call to inaction—a giant shrug delivered with the full 250% Tom Cruise energy.

On the positive side, I will say that it's refreshing in our current era of large-format fetishising—where poorly photographed movies receive praise and accolades simply because they use vintage cameras to capture their pedestrian compositions—I did enjoy seeing a large-format spectacle film that was actually well shot. The great Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Like Water for Chocolate, The Birdcage, Children of Men, The Tree of Life, Gravity) understands how to light, how to shoot, how to grade a film shot in a large, demanding, unwieldy format like VistaVision. Watching Digger on the same screen as the prior year's One Battle After Another makes Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Bauman's work on that equally shallow and simplistic picture look even more sloppy and gimmicky than it did when it came out.

But, just like One Battle, Digger also showcases the ridiculousness of releasing a film in a format that was never intended for theatrical projection. I saw Digger on its second day of release in one of the five theaters worldwide specially equipped with vintage museum equipment to enable a VistaVision presentation, and the print already showed visible damage. DAY TWO! Come on, folks. Compare that to The Brutalists, which shot on VistaVision and then made 70mm prints from the VistaVision negative, as the format was intended. The Brutalists still looked flawless on month three of screenings in the same moviehouse.

And while I've drifted off into extretextual digressions, and since I've been too busy to write down my thoughts about the film for weeks, I feel like I also need to shout down the claims made by many that not supporting this film and pretending to like it more than you do is somehow tantamount to voting against studios taking risks on original movies and sticking with safe IP crap. First of all, that's an absurd claim to make in 2026, the year that saw the release and massive embrace of Backrooms, Obsession, The Drama, The Invite, Hoppers, The Sheep Detectives, Disclosure Day, The End of Oak Street, Send Help, Primetime, Tony, I could go on and on. Second, our bizarre devotion to auteur theory basically renders any film directed by an "auteur" IP anyway. Digger may have been a commercial disappointment, but Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's Project Hail Mary was wildly successful earlier this year. Does one's failure cancel out the other's success? Pretending to like a movie you don't because you think it "helps the cause" seems a ludicrous idea.

However, lots of people genuinely do seem to dig Digger. All three of the friends I saw it with really liked it and are eager to see it again. And when I asked the room of 130 players at my last Movie Trivia Night how many were pro-Digger and how many were anti-Digger, it wasn't even close - something like 80/20 in favor of Digger. So, unlike Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis or Damien Chazelle's Babylon, this is one movie I think people might be right about when they say it may become far more lauded and popular ten or twenty years from now than it was at release.