It isn’t difficult to determine director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s personal convictions regarding the state of the world as the overstuffed plot of Digger unravels. He is certainly a believer in deadly climate change as a function of human progress, and places the blame solidly on the shoulders of oligarchs of all industries and nationalities. However, as the story becomes more complicated and less narratively reliable, it also becomes obvious that he isn’t sure if art has the actual power to speak truth to capitalistic perfidy, a notion that automatically gives rise to confusion over the purposes of this particular movie, which seemed clear at the outset but murkier as the true nature of the story reveals itself.
That isn’t to say Digger isn’t entertaining, only that its entertainment component feels beside the point given the huge consequence of González Iñárritu’s themes. The elephant in the room is Tom Cruise’s outsized performance as the title character, a stereotypically Texan oil baron-billionaire who struts and bellows and mugs shamelessly for his closeups, which he is not only ready for but constantly seeking out, as if by instinct. The best you can say about this stunt is that you really do forget you’re watching Tom Cruise, something I would have thought impossible since, to me at least, the definition of a true movie star is that you always see the star on the screen rather than the character. (I don’t necessarily say this is a bad thing, especially when it comes to stars of the classic Hollywood era, when stardom was the whole point) Digger Rockwell has been designed as a farcical presence, and when he wakes up one morning to find out that his rig on Greenland has ignited a methane explosion that’s released a hunk of ice the size of 60 Washington D.C.s, he goes from defiantly contrary to desperate and then back to defiantly contrary even before the president of the U.S. (John Goodman) and his ass-kissing henchmen show up at Digger’s palatial digs to talk about how to spin this disaster, which threatens millions of people in northern Europe. As it turns out, all these other characters, including the nominally level-headed climate scientist (Riz Ahmed) Digger grudgingly employs, are just as loudly mercurial and bug-eyed as Digger. Pandemonium ensues, but grounded by dialogue that tries to make sense of these characters’ fatuousness, and that’s when the switcheroo comes, heralded by a character played by Jesse Plemons who, as it turns out, has the last word on everything, thus throwing a monkey wrench into the satirical machinations on display.
Digger‘s artificiality, from the animatronic cat that seems to be Digger’s only true object of affection to the painted backdrops, is the movie’s real point, and I’m not sure if the theme of “this is where our planet is headed” survives the complications of context that González Iñárritu imposes on it. The beauty of Dr. Strangelove, a movie that critics are unfavorably comparing Digger to, was that it created a whole black comedy world out of a terrifying scenario that had not yet happened but could. Digger presupposes global collapse, not as a warning, but rather as a phenomenon on which to apply the metaphysics of cinematic craft.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Digger home page in Japanese
photo (c) 2026 WBEI and Legendary
