3/5 Stars, 7/12 For Reel Score

The following spoils the initial reveal of Digger

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger is a film seemingly designed to flop. It’s a brazen and often obnoxious political satire. A far cry from the carnival rides Tom Cruise has been churning out in an effort to rebrand himself from wacko Scientologist into lovable uncle who knows everything about filmmaking. He’s become one of the guys that conservatives brand as one of the only normal people in Hollywood. Brushing past that, Digger has marketed itself into a corner. The trailers present it as a straightforward lampoon of the billionaires who casually ruin our lives with their endless need to plunder the Earth in pursuit of more money. That is partially true. About a quarter of the way in it reveals itself to be a meta commentary on the very genre it seems to be wrapping its arms around. All of Digger’s virtues and vices tie into this twist and as such, it feels impossible to attempt to analyze it with any substance without going into it. This isn’t a Marvel movie. The verdict isn’t as simple as “the secrets behind the curtain are worth it.” I do recommend seeing the film and experiencing the reveal for yourself - but if you don’t mind hearing the hook (we won’t talk about the ending) or have just returned from the theater - let’s dig in.

We begin by meeting callous oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Cruise) as he mills about his home barking orders to his employees. At first he’s fussing over his dying cat Maggie, then he’s chewing out someone on his Greenland oil rig for daring to tell him an unfortunate truth. Methane is boiling underneath the ice. Shortly after the meeting, an explosion goes off, and a massive iceberg named Judy starts careening towards the UK. Digger folds in nervous environmental scientist Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) and senile cancer-ridden President Compson (John Goodman) to help, but the devastating outcome is inevitable. As Digger discusses this with Compson, the vista outside starts to move. Hands start adjusting the clouds and the trees. Off-stage voices call for a break and Digger walks off set and begins arguing with a director named Hannah (Sophie Wilde) about the material he’s been given. Everything we have watched is actually an elaborate dress rehearsal for a stage play called Fossil Fools. Digger is being portrayed by actor Curtis Markson, who is losing belief in the garish material at hand while also going through a family crisis. The film then dives back into the onstage reality for the second act, with more revealing on-set drama defining the third act.

Fossil Fools is a horrible play. It paints all of these characters with cartoonish brushstrokes. The evil characters are craven fools who comprehend nothing beyond their own selfish motivations. The good characters like Ganesh and Digger’s environmentally conscious half-sister Emma (Sandra Hüller) are nebbish scolds whose wounded consciences are coming to the surface far too late to be of use. Most of the time, we’re just watching these people shout their one-note opinions at this worsening catastrophe at each other. Every scene starts at eleven and stays there. Iñárritu clearly holds a deep contempt for the Biden-era “eat the rich” satires like Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Don’t Look Up or even Succession. Digger portrays them as a useless exercise, something for the masses to project their grievances onto without doing any internal work about their own role in our decaying world. The problem is that many of these stories are quite well-crafted on their own terms. They were slickly produced, often led by great actors and executed with genuinely compelling drama. You may hate every single character on a season of The White Lotus but regardless, they are captivating to watch.

Digger is not as captivating as it needs to be in either reality. By making Fossil Fools such a snoozefest, Iñárritu turns Digger into more of a “point and laugh at these idiots” project than any of the ones he’s critiquing. The move would’ve been to make the show stylistically intoxicating. Something that half of the audience would uncritically love watching so that the other half start a debate about media literacy. This would’ve also made the film easier to market. Contrary to Iñárritu’s belief, film fans aren’t total sheep. The footage looked insufferable and as such, people did not fill the theaters to watch Fossil Fools. To be clear, I think that this is an absolutely brilliant premise. It’s painful that Iñárritu’s execution is so middling because had he stuck the landing, this might’ve been one of the defining cinematic texts of the 2020s. The kind that would blossom into a classic taught in schools for decades to come. To be honest, I still think this outcome could be on the table.

Cruise is clearly going for the gold here but since we’re mostly spending time with Digger, he doesn’t get to truly crack himself open. That persona is entertaining enough. He fully embraces the ugly makeup and country-fried accent. His line deliveries are often funny, particularly in the argument scenes. The film stops for ten minutes so that Digger can deliver a speech about his love of the oil industry to a furious European tribunal that is clearly meant to be Cruise’s showcase clip for an Oscar. Despite the film’s reflexive nature, it doesn’t scoff at this overlong diatribe that even allows for a moment of crowdsurfing to show that Cruise still has the physical goods. Meanwhile, Curtis is the far more compelling character, acting as the audience’s avatar. He is just as disappointed with the material as we are. I wish that his trepidation had been allowed to crack through Digger once we re-immerse ourselves in Fossil Fools. Giving Cruise the opportunity to portray that level of self-consciousness as his character attempts to deliver Digger Rockwell would’ve been his ticket to accolades. Iñárritu only wants to challenge his megastar so much.

Our supporting players mostly get stuck in their characters but do mostly solid work. Goodman is a better demented Trump allegory than Mark Ruffalo was in Mickey-17. Watching him barely be able to comprehend the destruction in his wake does feel akin to reading the president’s disastrous Time Magazine transcript that came to light this week. Ahmed hits some high notes as the delirious scientist whose apathy reaches a boiling point that he never recovers from. Hüller is sadly underutilized even within the framework of Fossil Fools and as such isn’t even funny in the midst of her hooting and hollering. This just isn’t the kind of acting she excels at in any context.

Even though Digger doesn’t thematically gel as well as it needs to, I’m still glad it exists. Iñárritu is bold to address our culture’s lack of sincerity in such an elaborate manner and I immensely respect his attempt. It is almost a given to say that his technical execution is excellent, even if this time he’s intentionally giving us a drab and grey aesthetic backed by transportive production design. However, that visual prowess does make Digger worth experiencing on the big screen, even if it is a mess. Besides, with how poor its box office performance and reception is, this may be one of the last big budget Hollywood films to interrogate the very act of storytelling. Iñárritu’s final contradiction reveals itself as Jesse Plemmons’ David Ellison-esque billionaire reveals his personal motivations for putting on this production of Fossil Fools. In the now-cemented Skydance era of Hollywood, the real Ellison will ensure that such stories will not break through this next phase of dystopia.

Spoiler Review: Digger Parodies Itself Into A Hole