A spoiler-filled review

I saw Digger in a theater by myself.

That is obviously an anecdote rather than a statistically meaningful statement about the movie’s commercial prospects, but after watching Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s profoundly strange new film, it felt weirdly appropriate. Digger is a movie almost designed to leave you sitting alone with your thoughts. It is funny, infuriating, politically pointed, deliberately artificial, occasionally exhausting and packed with enough ideas for three or four less ambitious films. I walked out somewhere between liking it and loving it, while also wondering whether ordinary audiences are remotely prepared to do as much intellectual work as Digger demands of them.

A still from Digger from the Internet

That may eventually become the movie’s great virtue. In the immediate future, it may prove disastrous.

Digger stars Tom Cruise, heavily transformed by prosthetics, as Digger Rockwell, a grotesquely wealthy Texas oil baron whose refusal to stop drilling near Greenland leads to an explosion that dislodges a massive piece of ice. The resulting environmental catastrophe threatens Europe and eventually much of civilization. Riz Ahmed plays Ganesh, the scientist trying desperately to get powerful people to pay attention to physical reality; John Goodman plays President Compson; Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons fill out an extraordinary ensemble. Iñárritu shot the film in VistaVision with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, giving its deliberately bizarre world an almost grandiose physical presence.

If that were the movie, Digger would already be a fairly unsubtle climate-change version of Dr. Strangelove: powerful men confronting an existential catastrophe largely of their own making while worrying about politics, money, ego and public relations.

But that isn’t really the movie.

About half an hour in, Digger pulls the floor out from underneath us. Digger Rockwell isn’t Tom Cruise’s character at all. Cruise is actually playing Curtis Markson, an actor playing Digger Rockwell in a stage play called Fossil Fools. The cabinet officials, scientists, oil executives and politicians we have been watching are actors as well. What initially appeared to be cinematic reality is a theatrical reconstruction of an environmental catastrophe that occurred decades earlier.

And that reality is also in the future.

The first time through, I did not figure this out nearly as quickly as perhaps I should have. In my defense, I think that is exactly what the film wants. Digger feeds its audience information in dribs and drabs and encourages us to explain away the clues.

Technology in the backstage world isn’t quite contemporary. A supposedly impossible “Category 6” hurricane is affecting Curtis’ family, one of several signals that we are no longer living in 2026. The film eventually reveals a far more damaged world outside the theater: polluted air, flooded streets and people leaving the performance wearing breathing equipment while armed authorities patrol what remains of civilization. The catastrophe being reenacted in Fossil Fools isn’t a hypothetical warning about what might happen. For the people watching the play, it is history.

This recontextualizes almost everything that initially seems wrong with the movie.

Take the acting.

For much of Digger, Cruise, Goodman and some of the other performers appear to be overacting wildly. Lines are shouted. Gestures are huge. Reactions are exaggerated. Characters state things more explicitly than normal human beings generally would. Several critics have understandably found the effect grating; reviews have described the movie as bombastic, hysterical and excessively theatrical.

But they aren’t merely acting in a movie.

They are actors playing actors performing onstage.

Once that becomes clear, what looked like bad cinematic naturalism becomes something closer to theatrical convention. A performer onstage has to project physically and emotionally toward an audience sitting dozens of feet away. Dialogue is more declarative. Gestures become larger. Moral contrasts become broader.

The movie has hidden its theatricality in plain sight.

The same thing happens with the sets. Early in the film, there is an excuse for why an important government meeting is not taking place at the White House. Watching the scene initially, it simply seems like one more contrivance necessary to move the plot around. In retrospect, another explanation becomes irresistible: Fossil Fools is a play. Building an entirely new White House environment for one sequence would be an enormous theatrical headache.

The apparent limitations of the movie may actually be limitations of the fictional production inside the movie.

That is the sort of thing that makes me want to see Digger again.

And it gets to the central challenge of the film. Digger is one of those rare movies where, during the first viewing, you are partly learning how to watch the movie.

You aren’t merely following a story. You are continually revising your understanding of the ontology of that story. Is this happening now? Is this a dramatization? Are these people behaving unrealistically, or are actors deliberately portraying historical figures unrealistically? Are we being shown what actually happened, or what people decades later think happened?

The play itself repeatedly insists upon a distinction between facts and truth.

That distinction is enormously important.

Fossil Fools is not claiming to be a documentary transcript of the Digger Rockwell disaster. It is trying to communicate what its creators regard as the truth of the catastrophe: the greed, denial, narcissism, collective cowardice and self-deception that allowed it to happen. Facts can tell future generations where the drilling platform was, when the explosion occurred and how many people died. Art asks the more dangerous question: What kind of civilization knew this was happening and continued anyway?

Iñárritu has effectively confirmed that this historical-distance mechanism is central to the project. He has said that, as the film developed over almost a decade, reality began catching up with the filmmakers’ exaggerations so quickly that he came to think of Digger as something like a “documentary of the future.” In another interview, he described the film as a distorted mirror of present, past and future and emphasized collective responsibility alongside the obvious guilt of powerful individuals.

That distinction also rescues Digger, at least partially, from one of the biggest problems that afflicted Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up.

The easy version of a climate-change satire divides humanity into sensible people who understand science and stupid or evil people who don’t. The audience naturally identifies with the sensible people. We walk out congratulating ourselves for having understood a movie whose villains were obviously wrong.

Digger ultimately refuses to give us that comfort.

Its most effective sequence may be Digger’s enormous speech defending fossil-fuel civilization. Digger’s argument isn’t simply that climate change is fake. It is that the rest of us are hypocrites. We demand cheap travel, consumer products, transportation, plastics, abundant energy and the entire petroleum-dependent architecture of modern existence—and then pretend that the people supplying it are uniquely responsible for the consequences. Critics have singled the sequence out as one of the film’s strongest moments precisely because it shifts responsibility from an easily hated billionaire onto the civilization that made him possible.

Digger is still a monster. But monsters rarely build civilizations by themselves.

That is also why I suspect the movie will be politically polarizing.

Climate change is not background decoration in Digger. It is the movie’s moral foundation. The film takes as given that anthropogenic environmental destruction is real, consequential and likely to be judged harshly by generations forced to live with its effects. For viewers who already regard climate change as one of the great collective-action failures of modern civilization, that premise gives the movie considerable emotional force.

Someone deeply hostile to climate politics may have exactly the opposite experience. The film will probably seem sanctimonious, hysterical and politically accusatory. Even viewers who agree with its politics may recoil from how aggressively it makes its case.

That helps explain the remarkable critical response already forming around Digger. As of October 1, before its wide U.S. opening, Rotten Tomatoes lists the film at 53 percent from 163 reviews. Some critics have called it a spectacularly ambitious piece of cinema; others have essentially declared it an unbearable act of artistic self-importance. One positive review argues that if viewers survive its dramatic left turn, it becomes one of the year’s most rewarding films. Others regard the theatrical reveal as precisely the moment when the movie destroys its own dramatic momentum.

Both reactions make sense to me.

Because Digger asks an extraordinary amount from its audience.

You have to process the environmental argument. You have to follow an intentionally ridiculous geopolitical satire. You have to recognize that the acting style itself contains information. You have to distinguish the historical world of Digger Rockwell from the later world of Curtis Markson. You have to notice futuristic technology without being told immediately that you are in the future. You have to think about whether the play is historically accurate. You have to think about whether historical accuracy even matters if its larger argument is true. And finally you have to process the devastating implication of those theatergoers walking back into their damaged world after laughing at the idiots who destroyed it.

That final image may be the cruelest joke in the movie.

The future audience gets to feel morally superior to Digger Rockwell.

Then they put on their masks and go home.

And once you understand that, the movie turns its attention toward us.

We are watching a fictional future audience watch a fictional theatrical audience’s version of something that resembles our present. We can laugh at Digger. We can laugh at President Compson. We can congratulate ourselves for recognizing their greed and stupidity.

And then we leave the theater and drive home through a civilization still burning fossil fuels.

That is much more interesting than simply saying “oil companies bad.”

It may also be far more complicated than a mass audience wants from a Tom Cruise movie.

Commercially, that issue could become serious. Digger reportedly cost north of $125 million, while one respected pre-release tracking analysis currently projects a domestic opening of only roughly $7.5 million to $12.5 million, with studio tracking somewhat higher at $12 million to $15 million. Those are forecasts, not actual grosses, and the film had not yet completed its opening weekend when I wrote this, so declarations of financial catastrophe would be premature. But the disparity illustrates the risk of spending blockbuster money on something this formally strange.

Warner Bros. appears to understand the problem. Its marketing has already begun embracing the polarized response, essentially inviting audiences to decide for themselves amid wildly contradictory reviews. The campaign’s “Same movie. Different truths” idea is particularly appropriate for a film explicitly obsessed with competing versions of truth.

And this is where I wonder whether Digger‘s long-term fate could be very different from its short-term one.

I can easily imagine audiences rejecting this movie now.

I can also imagine people becoming obsessed with it five or ten years from now.

Cult movies often contain exactly the qualities that damage them upon release. They are too peculiar for casual audiences, too abrasive for consensus approval and too densely constructed to surrender everything on first viewing. Their initial failure becomes part of their mythology. Eventually people discover them knowing that they are strange. Confusion stops being an unpleasant surprise and becomes part of the attraction.

Digger seems almost engineered for that trajectory.

A second viewing would allow an audience to watch the entire opening differently. Suddenly the exaggerated performances are clues. The oddly artificial locations are clues. The apparently unnecessary bits of future technology are clues. The peculiar logistical decisions surrounding the government response are clues. Instead of wondering why the movie feels slightly wrong, you can examine exactly how carefully it constructed that wrongness.

Whether this ultimately adds up to greatness is another question.

There are stretches where Digger is exhausting. The volume rarely comes down. Some jokes don’t land. The Curtis subplot never becomes emotionally as rich as the film seems to want it to be. There are moments when Iñárritu’s ambition slides dangerously close to self-indulgence. Critics who accuse the film of being too clever for its own good aren’t imagining the problem. Even one broadly favorable review called it dense enough to become overwhelming.

But I would much rather wrestle with an ambitious movie that sometimes fails than watch another perfectly competent movie disappear from my memory before I reach the parking lot.

Several hours after seeing Digger, I was still thinking about it.

I was still reconstructing earlier scenes.

I was still realizing why particular performances had felt strange.

I was still thinking about the artificiality of the sets, the future technology, the play’s insistence on truth rather than merely facts, the ending, the masks, the destroyed world outside the theater and the uncomfortable question of how people living decades from now might dramatize us.

That counts for a great deal.

Digger may be too obtuse. It may be too self-conscious. It may ask more intellectual participation than a mainstream audience is willing to provide. It may even become one of those enormously expensive movies whose commercial failure is discussed almost as much as the movie itself.

But I don’t think it is boring.

I don’t think it is stupid.

And I certainly don’t think it is disposable.

There is a strange, furious intelligence underneath all the shouting. The movie’s central conceit—that future generations might turn our ecological failures into theater and argue about whether art should preserve the facts or expose the truth—is genuinely provocative. Its theatrical artifice is not simply a gimmick. Once understood, it changes the meaning of almost everything around it.

Maybe that is Digger‘s problem.

To appreciate the movie, you first have to figure out what movie you are watching.

I am not sure a mass audience will have the patience.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a small audience is going to love this thing for years.

And I may be one of them.