Digger: Panic Is a Resource

If you think One Battle After Another needed more (a lot more) of the Christmas Adventurers Club, you might find yourself reveling in the new weird Tom Cruise movie. Then again, you might walk out before the first act is over, as many early reviewers are claiming to have done, or at least wished to. Digger, the latest from uncompromising Mexican auteur Alejandro González Iñárritu, seems purposely designed to frustrate any angle of enjoyment a casual viewer might pursue.

The rumors that Digger is secretly a musical are inaccurate, but it has more in common with Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning Birdman than the ads let on. The rug pull from “Dr. Strangelove of climate change” to something darker and deeper, achingly teased out over the story’s second half, is less a surprise twist than a spiritual puzzle.

The film opens with uber-capitalist “Digger” Rockwell waking up in silk pajamas in his palatial mansion to tend to his wretched, incontinent 30 year old cat. During a tense veterinary house call, Digger fields increasingly distressed messages from his company’s functionaries about an explosion on one of his oil rigs in Greenland. As the damage expands to an international catastrophe, the oilman huddles with a government cabal led by President Compson (John Goodman, channeling both Ren and Stimpy) to control the narrative and save the day. Riz Ahmed plays Digger’s science advisor, given the thankless job of explaining the stakes to a group of powerful men incapable of listening.

This is the “bomb the iceberg” satire the trailers are selling. Despite energetic turns from a deep roster of talent, including Sandra Hüller in a throwaway role as Digger’s wanna-preneur sister, the madcap buffoonery feels forced and off-putting. That is, until the film throws a major curveball, led by Jesse Plemons as a mysterious background character.

With longtime cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu crafts another collection of impeccably choreographed long takes, including a showstopper featuring Cruise climbing up, around, and over an assembly of musty bureaucrats while ranting at the complacency of the masses. Many visual elements harken back to Lubezki’s work on Children of Men (2006), as well as the bleached expressionism of Roy Andersson.

Naturally, all eyes are on Cruise, working under enough prosthetics to make his Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder seem lightweight. The superstar doesn’t quite disappear into the character of Digger, but he steps up to the task Iñárritu sets for him with the right combination of manic energy and multi-level spiralling. If Cruise were ever due an Oscar, it would be this one.

To be frank, the scathing early reviews aren’t totally unfounded. Long stretches of Digger are a chore to sit through. But the film sacrifices watchability for something more interesting: an elegiac fable of history hijacked by the driven capitalists, politicians and warmongers who functionally create the world we live in. As it dissects the implications of the phrase “controlling the narrative,” Digger reveals a quiet hostility to audience expectations reminiscent of Ari Aster’s divisive Beau Is Afraid (2023).  Digger could ultimately be construed as a perverse call to radicalism in its anti-capitalist ouroboros.

The many intentional alienation tactics Iñárritu deploys will be a heavy lift for the Top Gun crowd.  Smart money won’t bet on this film recouping anything near its reported $125 million budget.  Pairing old-fashioned star power with visionary ugliness, its energy is more metaphysical than political. Its structure forces you to decipher what’s really happening while blasting you in the face with the same wall of noise it’s surreptitiously critiquing. The powerful won’t save anyone but themselves, and will probably fail at that. What are you going to do about it?

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of Hyperreal Film Journal for as low as $3 a month!