Digger Review
Tom Cruise and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu go for broke in a wild climate satire
© Warner Bros
There’s a scene midway through Digger in which Tom Cruise’s titular character uses three slices of apparently top-grade yellow fin tuna to make a point about climate change and mankind’s capacity for hypocrisy. Ironically, however, it’s the film itself that feels filleted and defanged. With a production that has encompassed the entirety of the first half of Donald Trump’s second term, from October 2024 to now, one might have expected the film, from Birdman and The Revenant director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, to have symbiotically absorbed much anger and righteous fury from the global ecosystem. What a disappointment, therefore, to note that the film’s apparently bold swings are more blunt ones, and that the right-on messaging about capitalist-enabled climate change should feel so meek and timid, thin-skinned, even.
The most notable skinjob is on star Cruise, here aged up and bewigged to play the ailing and decadent oil tycoon Digger Rockwell. Isolated in his mansion with his practically decomposing yet beloved cat Maggie by his side, Rockwell is alerted when one of his Greenland-based oil platforms hits a dangerous methane leak. In a matter of minutes, a gigantic ice shelf the size of Boston has separated from the mainland and is on course via ocean currents and the wind to strike the coast of Norway, practically obliterating the entirety of Northern Europe. A quick recon with the cadaverous U.S. President Compson (John Goodman) makes one thing clear: this is Rockwell’s problem to clear up, and it may involve the green energy put forward by his antagonistic sister Emma (Sandra Huller, sorely underused), but he’s definitely not about to listen to the (relatively) calm rationale of his top science advisor Ganesh (an excellent Riz Ahmed).
Following that set-up, the movie then takes one of the wildest narrative swings of any movie in 2026, not to be spoiled here. Naturally, that makes the film inordinately difficult to review, would that it were worth the effort in the first place. Needless to say, Digger reveals itself as a bombastic satire operating on two different levels, very much milking an overworked theme: mankind’s tendency to reconcile with cataclysm via the medium of absurdist pantomime, akin to a mixture of Wes Anderson’s storybook dioramas and the goofy gurning of David O. Russell. The problem is, when our daily reality outside the cinema auditorium is itself so horrifying, the satire becomes redundant, or at least it does here when presented with such a distinct lack of bite.
If Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove dared to imagine the world exploding in a nuclear fireball just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Inarritu surely had more than enough real-world detail to draw on to make Digger as uncompromising and dangerous, analogous not with nuclear threat exclusively, but with modern-day concerns of rising temperatures and sea levels being used as political footballs. Instead, it’s all a bit on the nose and tick-list checking: the movie’s imagery of a table full of awful, climate-denying white male politicians and military leaders using derogatory and sexist language should be enough to stoke rage with its clear 21st-century parallels; instead, it feels like a prime moment of, so what? The principles are there, but the ideology is half-baked and overly familiar.
Instead, the movie is more occupied with shouting, gurning and actors under heavy prosthetics. The masterful ensemble in Doctor Strangelove never behaved as if they were in a comedy, which paradoxically made it one of the greatest dark satires of all time. All of the performers in Digger, however, behave as if they are firmly in on the joke, negating any satirical impact. Credit where it’s due to Cruise: even in his weakest movies, he rarely commits less than 100%, and the same is true here. He gives a noisy maelstrom of a performance that is often amusing, more often than not down to his own instincts as a performer as opposed to the blunt instrument of a script. Channelling J.R. Ewing by way of his own Magnolia character Frank T.J. Mackay, Cruise delivers at least one barn-burner of a scene in which he whips a furious crowd into an ecstatic fervour; it goes beyond conventional acting into the realm of calculated performance art, something that has often been levelled at Cruise, but his energy and bluster are never less than watchable.
If Cruise’s sheer go-for-broke bravado invites some degree of admiration, then one ought to at least credit the audacity of the film’s vision. Throwing audience expectations and niceties to the wind, Digger is an unashamedly strange experience, far stranger than the trailers have suggested, and for at least daring to get the audience to think amid a sea of beige, streaming-mandated product, it deserves a grudging respect. The problem is that several finicky narrative devices have the opposite effect of what the filmmakers likely intended: over the course of the running time, we are steadily removed from the visceral realities of climate change in favour of a clever-clever movie about famous people playing dress-up. This was a film that demanded much more emotional directness and less smug intellectual abstraction to make its points. The film sits in a strange sunken place between outright catastrophe and maverick success, dotted with incidental pleasures, not least Emmanuel Lubezki’s handsome lensing of cavernous, gilded interiors, but it’s nowhere near as risky as it thinks it is.
Rating: 3/5
Sean Wilson is a Film Critic based in Bristol, UK. If you enjoyed his review, please consider supporting him by subscribing to his substack or by purchasing his book The Sound of Cinema
