SPOILER WARNING: This review discusses a major structural reveal and the ending of Digger.
Tom Cruise is finally doing a movie that isn’t part of a franchise, and somehow Digger feels like exactly the kind of insane swing you would hope for from a filmmaker like Alejandro G. Iñárritu. This is a movie-star movie in every sense of the word. Alongside Cruise, you’ve got Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, and seemingly every other recognizable actor in Hollywood. Iñárritu is clearly not afraid to take a massive swing here, and that’s one of the things I appreciated most about the movie.
The marketing for Digger was incredibly secretive. The first teaser barely told you anything, and there were all these rumors about what the movie actually was. Was it some giant comedy? Was it secretly a musical? What exactly was going on? From the very first frame, I had the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Tom Cruise is lying in bed next to this bizarre, almost animatronic-looking cat, and the background looks strangely artificial. Later, he’s talking to the President of the United States in another picture-perfect environment, and suddenly a person pops up from underneath the ground because they’re fixing the set. I remember thinking, What the hell is happening? Then, roughly 30 minutes in, the movie reveals what it’s actually doing: the characters aren’t simply living in this world. They’re putting on a play about a catastrophic event that happened 25 years earlier — an event involving Digger Rockwell that fundamentally changed the course of human history. The people we’re watching are portraying real people, and the world outside the play is this devastated, post-climate-catastrophe nightmare. That reveal is absolutely going to make or break this movie for people. Personally, I liked it.
In fact, I found the reality outside the play more interesting than the play itself. The movie spends so much time making you wonder what the actual world looks like, and eventually, when the characters leave the theater, put on gas masks and walk outside, you finally see it: flooded streets, toxic air and a world that has been completely ravaged. Those moments were some of my favorite parts of the movie because they gave you a glimpse of the actual consequences of everything the film had been talking about. At its core, Digger is trying to tackle a ridiculous number of enormous subjects: climate change, our obsession with oil, greed, billionaires consuming resources, the way governments respond to catastrophe, aging men holding enormous amounts of power, and the uncomfortable reality that ordinary people are also participants in the systems we’re criticizing. We complain about oil and pollution, but we still need gas for our cars. We need electricity, air conditioning, food, phones and all the conveniences that come from the very systems we’re condemning. The movie practically screams these ideas at you, and that’s where I started to have some problems.
There are multiple moments where Digger essentially stops dead in its tracks to tell you exactly what it wants you to think and how it wants you to feel. Sometimes I was completely engaged. Other times I was rolling my eyes. The movie can be extremely preachy, and its political and environmental commentary can feel almost painfully on the nose. But at the same time, it’s hard to completely dismiss what it’s saying when the subjects are so relevant to the world we’re living in right now. One of the most interesting ideas is the play itself: these characters are turning an actual human tragedy into entertainment. They’re making jokes about something that killed millions of people and fundamentally altered civilization. That reminded me of the way people eventually begin making memes and jokes about tragedies like 9/11. There’s a point where enough time has passed that humor becomes one of the ways people process something horrific. Digger is fascinated by that contradiction — whether turning tragedy into comedy is disrespectful or whether it’s simply part of how humans cope.
The movie’s best sequence, for me, comes when Digger Rockwell gives a huge monologue in front of a room full of angry men. It’s incredibly blunt, but the argument is fascinating: everyone can complain about climate change, corporations, oil companies and governments, but we’re all dependent on the things those systems provide. We want to have our cars, our phones, our air conditioning, our food and all the comforts of modern life. It’s an uncomfortable point, even if the movie makes it about as subtly as a sledgehammer. And then there are the performances. Tom Cruise is really good, and I don’t want the movie’s divisive reception to overshadow that. He gets to play something very different from the franchise roles we’ve seen him doing for years, and he’s terrific here. If Tom Cruise makes a movie, I’m probably going to see it anyway, but I genuinely think he gives Digger everything he’s got. Riz Ahmed is also really good in the material he’s given, but my biggest discovery was Sophie Wilde. She plays Hannah, the stage manager of the play, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything before. I kept thinking, Who is this girl? She’s fantastic. For much of the movie, she’s going toe-to-toe with Tom Cruise, and I was completely invested in those scenes. She deserves a lot of credit for holding her own opposite one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. John Goodman is another story. I love John Goodman, but his performance is intentionally so loud and over-the-top that a lot of the comedy didn’t work for me. There is a lot of yelling and broad humor throughout the movie, and some of it landed while some of it absolutely did not.
That’s basically my relationship with Digger as a whole: I admired it more than I loved it. Iñárritu is clearly trying to make something ambitious, strange and completely unlike the standard Hollywood blockbuster, and that’s something I genuinely appreciate. When you look at movies like Birdman, Bardo and The Revenant, you see a filmmaker who is willing to take enormous creative risks, and Digger is absolutely another one of those risks. Honestly, I haven’t seen a giant blockbuster in a long time that feels this interested in asking big questions. The problem is that I’m not sure who this movie is actually for. If you’re not interested in Iñárritu’s style, if you don’t enjoy climate-change satire, if you don’t want to spend two-plus hours watching a movie lecture you about the state of the world, or if the play-within-a-movie structure doesn’t work for you, there’s probably not much here that the enormous cast or Tom Cruise’s star power can do to save the experience.
But I also don’t think Digger deserves to simply be dismissed. Hollywood needs movies like this. We need filmmakers willing to spend enormous amounts of money on original ideas instead of another sequel, remake or franchise installment. We need movie stars willing to take risks. And we need directors who are willing to make something that might completely blow up in their faces. Digger might be too preachy. It might be too weird. It might be too long. It might be too on-the-nose. But at least it’s swinging for the fences. And in a movie landscape where so many big-budget films feel designed by committee, there’s something refreshing about watching a movie this strange, this ambitious and this willing to fail spectacularly. I don’t think everything Digger tries to do works, but I sure am glad somebody tried.
Digger = 82/100
