Writer/director/producer Alejandro G. Iñárritu is back with Digger, the exact kind of smarter-than-you, self-congratulatory arthouse colonoscopy that it claims within the runtime to rail against. This is the emptiest film of the year, and I can’t remember ever wanting to walk out of a movie more.
The near future- Generational oil tycoon “Digger” Rockwell (Tom Cruise, who also produces) learns an ice shelf five times the size of the D.C. metro area has broken off Greenland and is rocketing toward Norway, with estimated casualties in the millions and property damage in the trillions, because of his company’s reckless drilling. Such is his pull, Rockwell summons the president of the U.S. and his cabinet to his estate and dictates how they will navigate the crisis.
Digger is a satire within a satire that accomplishes little and feels about a quarter century late. The film takes aim at lying oil executives and the politicians in bed with them and opens fire with takes that were already lukewarm when Al Gore was running for president on them, courageously tearing into subjects ranging from the American instinct to approach every problem with bombs and money to the apparent hypocrisy of countries continuing to rely on oil-based infrastructure long after climate change had become an international concern – this is out of date at a factual level. Solar has been cheaper than coal-based energy for years now and is expanding rapidly across the world.
The president (John Goodman) calls out Gore by name as a throwaway gag early in the film, and that’s about par for the weirdly dated pop-political references that serve as “humor” in the film, interspersed with half-hearted gross-out gags there to remind you that someone behind the camera thought this was funny. Even the Trump-specific callbacks like pulling out of the Paris Agreement – which he did for the first time almost 10 years ago now – or making fun of his feckless minion of a vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg) make you wonder what rock Iñárritu and the three other credited screenwriters, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman, think you’ve been living under.
It’s a lot of the type of surface-level observations of surface-level stoogery that led to Trump-era politics being associated with the death of satire, but satire is not dead just because you personally can’t think of a joke – The Onion never quit on us. Far right politicians are famously insecure, just not about the things politicians traditionally try to hide. Digger illustrates not that satire is dead, but what it looks like when lazy satirists don’t want to keep up.
That’s the reason for Digger’s icy reception and commercial failure. It’s a comedy that isn’t funny. The vibes are “failed comedian begrudgingly riffing on decades-old headlines at his local retirement home.” It doesn’t have the juice.
The visual effects are noticeably cheap – there’s diegetic reason for that, but at an estimated budget of $125 million, does there need to be? There are better, cheaper ways to execute everything Digger calls for, even within the conceit, and at least this viewer would be more than willing to suspend more disbelief in exchange for a better-looking film.
Where the film is expensive – IMAX-capable cameras for a large-format arthouse rollout, attempting to follow the twin success of Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon – it’s expensive for expense’s sake. Digger’s decision-makers want photography director Emmanuel Lubezki and production designers Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson to be able to talk about the sacrosanct reality of 35mm film during a months-long multi-pronged Oscar push, but the beauty of this format does no favors to the flatly lit grays they decided to shoot with it.
The bigger problem is the film’s conceit doesn’t accomplish anything. Avoiding spoilers, the film adds in a framing device early on that recontextualizes the narrative, but doesn’t actually change the context relative to you the viewer, just moves it further away from you in a straight line. We revisit the framing device at several moments, and it always feels like a huge waste of time that kills all the movie’s momentum, making its 129 minutes feel agonizing by the end.
The point appears to be to mock films like Vice and Don’t Look Up that play at spreading awareness about socio-political crises, but are only ever marketed to Oscar-season viewers who already know more than the movies cover, and sure, whatever. Those movies suck, and the specific type of self-righteous upper-class liberals they were made for also mostly suck. Digger would do a better job of undermining them if it were itself a better, more straightforward movie.
This is another moment where Digger flat-out gets the facts wrong. The film argues directly that oil executives like Rockwell and their politicians are fearsome and Machiavellian in real life, not the buffoons we see in court jests, and I don’t know how you make that argument in a scene that also directly acknowledges Vice President J.D. Vance. Cartoonish incompetence is one of the major running themes of corrupt governments throughout history – recent history, the specific history Digger appears to be about, indicates that more corrupt governments are more cartoonish and incompetent – and contradicting that ends up coming across as just as out-of-touch as something like Vice or Don’t Look Up.
Most of the budget likely went toward personnel, and this is an all-star team, but nobody’s best work. Goodman, Stuhlbarg, Sandra Hüller and Burn Gorman are all decorating the background, but given little to do. Riz Ahmed and Robert John Burke have meatier roles as the main scientist and biggest military meathead, respectively, but their performances are much better than their roles deserve.
Digger has been sold primarily as Cruise’s big transition from action to arthouse after the last movie star kept jumping out of planes on-camera into his 60s, and Warner Bros. – or whatever the company’s called now – will spend more and more energy focusing on his 10-minute one-shot monologue as Oscar season ramps up. Cruise is an all-world performer even without his usual shtick, and he makes this performance look easy even through his fatsuit and prosthetics, but he’s got the same problem. There’s just nothing special about the part of Digger Rockwell, and Cruise can’t sing and dance enough to make it special.
Cruise is the selling point, but Iñárritu’s personality and tendencies drive the film, and in his first theatrical feature in more than a decade, that personality seems to have run dry. You can see him in the big floating camera movements and layers of reality – three of his past four films feature waking dream sequences, plays within a film, or both – but Digger’s overarching absence of anything to say reflects mostly on him.
The planned push for Cruise’s Oscar is also behind the breathless coverage of the film’s disastrous $8 million opening, no. 4 behind two holdovers and a Colleen Hoover adaptation, mostly driven by the frigid critical reception and lack of blockbuster appeal. There’s no mystery here – the advertising campaign so focused on hiding the twist that it wouldn’t pick a selling point left potential viewers skeptical, and then turned off when they saw the crush of negative reviews – and the apoplectic fallout appears to be the salvage of a media push that was bought and paid for well in advance.
In the weeks since its release, pundits and social media have threatened us with the end of Hollywood risk-taking as retribution for the film’s failure, but I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out a single risk Digger takes. It’s completely stacked with talent on both sides of the camera and flush with cash for both production and an early-season Oscar push that has immediately brought the film’s insufferable sense of entitlement from the silver screen straight into your feed, but all it can do is preach to a choir of Los Angelinos it half-remembers from decades ago. This movie isn’t even brave enough to pick a real color palette.
Digger is mostly just condescending, seemingly made for people who’ve never seen an Oscarbate movie before, but the idea that this is the standard-bearer for Hollywood risk-taking in the year of Backrooms and Obsession, sharing multiplexes with films like Primetime, You Can See Everything and Victorian Psycho and fighting for IMAX screens with The Odyssey is actively insulting. You would have to be unfamiliar with movies as a cultural concept to see Digger and go along with this, but only the most dedicated cinephiles are buying tickets in the first place.
Digger is not only unwatchable, but offers no reason to watch it. Spend your time on a film that takes real risks.
Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.
