‘Digger’ movie review: Alejandro G. Iñárritu or: How Tom Cruise Learned to Stop Running and Love the Bit

I don’t get it…

…is what I periodically muttered to myself as I sat gobsmacked, trying to reverse-engineer what the hell Alejandro González Iñárritu thought he was doing with this postmodernist fever dream of a movie— a $125-million climate-catastrophe clown car starring none other than Hollywood’s most indestructible human, in what has already been anointed by the surrounding discourse as the defining feat of his latter-career resurrection tour. By now, the divisiveness surrounding Digger has become almost as baroque as the film itself, partly because of some baffling narrative choices and partly because of Iñárritu’s unchecked self-indulgence. Yet, as the film progressed, my initial “I don’t get what he’s trying to do here” gradually mutated into “I don’t get why everyone seems to hate this thing so much.”

The film opens the titular Digger Rockwell, a Texas oil billionaire whose mansion is an obscene catalogue of wealth and a comprehensive inventory of his appetites, including taxidermied animals, heavy weaponry, and enough conspicuous old-money ornamentation to justify his very obvious entitlement. Digger has made his fortune by taking things out of the ground, but the one natural resource he is currently unwilling to surrender is Maggie, his thirty-year-old, bedraggled, incontinent cat, whose veterinarian estimates that she has anywhere between a few minutes and a couple of weeks left. Then an explosion at one of Digger’s drilling facilities in Greenland tears through the Arctic ice shelf, kills the workers at the site and dislodges a colossal section of ice that begins drifting towards Europe, while the resulting methane release threatens to turn things into a civilisation-scale catastrophe.

Digger’s response naturally, is not immediate accountability but an emergency gathering of people whose first instinct is to determine who can be blamed and what can be concealed. The American President, played by John Goodman as a deteriorating political grotesque, arrives with Vice-President Michael Stuhlbarg and an assortment of bootlicking officials, while Riz Ahmed’s environmental scientist, Nirav Ganesh desperately attempts to explain the scope of the imminent apocalypse. Sandra Hüller plays Digger’s sister and business partner, while Emma D’Arcy stars as Digger’s level-headed assistant Lina.

But before we go any further, I honestly don’t think there is any point attempting a meaningful critique of this movie without discussing its big reveal, so consider this your SPOILER WARNING.

Digger is deliberately drawn as a human Foghorn Leghorn, with a generous helping of Les Grossman’s vulgarity, and Cruise attacks the part with the exact kind of shamelessness that made the latter one of his great comic performances. There isn’t a trace of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, Ethan Hunt or Jerry Maguire here. Cruise is completely buried inside the prosthetics, the pot belly, the thinning hair, the drawl and that permanently irritated physicality, making this his most engulfing performance since A Few Good Men and Eyes Wide Shut. Digger is a disgusting oaf, but Cruise never plays him as merely stupid; there is always the conviction of a man who genuinely believes his own greed is a public service. The best showcase of that inflated conviction comes during the standout ten-minute confrontation with the European leaders. Digger’s monologue turns the room against itself, arguing that everyone condemning him still depends on the oil he supplies (someone even flings a shoe at him à la George Bush in Iraq); and Cruise rips through the scene with such physical and vocal force. The performance is enormous, but it doesn’t feel vain. Cruise has completely surrendered to the satire.

A still from ‘Digger’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros.

There are plenty of recognisable faces orbiting Cruise, and most of them do perfectly serviceable work. Goodman, in particular, gives what may be the most convincing on-screen performance of a geriatric President with rectal cancer (that somehow isn’t a biopic?). But the only actor who consistently manages to stand his ground and occasionally even outshining the behemoth that is Cruise, is Riz Ahmed. Ahmed plays the film’s reluctant voice of reason with a wonderfully understated combination of sheepishness, exasperation and barely contained disbelief. Ganesh is surrounded by people with vastly more money and power than him, but he is also the only person who seems to have retained a functioning spine, which makes his increasingly futile attempts to get Digger to confront reality considerably funnier than any of the broader political caricatures around him. The role was reportedly intended for our own Fahadh Faasil before he dropped out, and all credit to Fahadh, but I genuinely struggle to imagine anyone making Ganesh this convincing. Every time the two share a scene, Ahmed ends up stealing scenes from Cruise without ever appearing to compete for them. 

From the very beginning however, something about Digger feels wrong. Not wrong in the sense of incompetence, but wrong in the sense that reality itself seems to have been nudged a few degrees sideways. Emmanuel Lubezki shoots the world with sumptuous, saturated images that are too composed to feel entirely natural, while Dennis Gassner’s production design keeps filling the frame with textures and architectural details that seem to have been placed with suspicious deliberateness. Iñárritu compounds that artificiality with his off-kilter compositions and hilariously precise blocking. Despite the way Digger has been sold as a giant piece of contemporary satire in the vein of Don’t Look Up or Barbie, it felt far too stilted for its message to come through cleanly. But all of this was deliberate. 

A still from ‘Digger’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros.

Roughly thirty minutes in, Iñárritu pulls the rug out from under the entire thing. The world we have been watching thus far, has been a stage play called Fossil Fools. Digger Rockwell is not Digger Rockwell. He is Curtis, a stage actor playing the late oil baron in a deliberately exaggerated production about the past catastrophe. The camera withdraws and suddenly the mansion reveals itself as an elaborate theatrical production. Screens, rotating platforms and translucent partitions rearrange the world before our eyes, suddenly turning the film into a near-Brechtian contraption. Here, Curtis is visibly uncomfortable with the way Digger has been written. He thinks the character is too cartoonish and too obviously constructed to provoke laughter, and he wants some semblance of psychological realism. Later, his director essentially reminds him that he is performing a comedy and that the audience has to be able to laugh at it. Digger’s monstrousness has to be made entertaining because the play exists after some catastrophic reckoning that has left the world outside in ruins. This big switch did leave me scratching my head. We repeatedly move between the ridiculous Diggerverse and the comparatively solemn backstage world and the oscillation initially felt incredibly frustrating.

With the planet already tottering toward oblivion, Digger cannot escape the shadow of Dr. Strangelove, but to Iñárritu’s credit, he seems to intuitively understand that Digger itself is a frivolous industrial product made possible by the very fossil-fuel economy this pseudo-production is satirising. All the directorial self-importance and unhinged formal contortions notwithstanding, there still seems to be a genuine current of civilisational despair and Iñárritu seems just as trapped as everyone else.

A still from ‘Digger’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros.

But for me the film’s most delicious conceit came through Jesse Plemons’ surprise reveal, which brings the film’s earlier jokes about the U.S. government/Digger’s Firewall failsafe and “controlling the narrative” full circle in a beautifully twisted way. Plemons’ brief but almost euphemistic monologue opens up some sinister little questions about who gets to own a work of art and the futility of trying to avoid who gets to shape the story it tells. 

The meta-context makes the joke considerably richer, because Digger seems self-aware of how it is being used to manufacture the Tom Cruise narrative. Much of the promotional material effectively turns his entire career into a highlight reel leading toward this supposed late-career revival, while Warner Bros. has been working the Oscar campaign overtime to give the veteran his shiny little coronation — Iñárritu, after all, has already helped turn another beloved Hollywood figure into an awards-season redemption story. But the timing is also too on-the-nose to be true. Digger releases in what may be the last brief window of Warner Bros. Discovery as we have known it, with Paramount Skydance now days away from closing its heavily contested $110-billion acquisition of the company, and its freshly minted CEO sporting some rather conspicuous Tel Aviv bona fides. Without pretending Digger is secretly translating every fresh horror in the real world into cinematic allegory, there is something pretty funny about the fact that things seem to have gotten so catastrophically awful on both the planetary and Hollywood fronts that even Tom Cruise has decided it is time to stop smiling, strap on the serious face and contemplate the end of civilisation as we know it.

And yet Digger cannot quite escape the disease it is diagnosing. Its two-and-a-half-hour attack on spectacle is in itself a colossal spectacle. This is after all, a VistaVision production stuffed with rotating sets, elaborate visual compositions and the most recognisable superstar in Hollywood. The irony is difficult to miss, but is it all deliberate, or are they simply committing to the bit in retrospect? This ridiculous Russian doll of a film provides no easy answers. It is too loud and ornate, and entirely intoxicated by its own smugness. But its anger is real, and so is the sadness beneath it. Iñárritu ultimately turns the joke back on us just for good measure.

I still don’t entirely get it. But I think I get why I don’t get it.

Digger is currently running in theatres

Published – October 02, 2026 04:27 pm IST