What, exactly, is “Digger” (2026)? A blockbuster? An arthouse flick? A masterpiece? A disaster? The most fitting term is ‘anomaly’ — but that is putting it far too lightly. Only one thing is certain: You’ve never seen anything quite like it.
“Digger,” the latest film from Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu, stars Tom Cruise as the aging, charismatic oil tycoon Digger Rockwell. The story itself is too insane (and too revealing) to explain, but the basic premise is that Digger, due to his relentless drilling operation in Greenland, has triggered a natural disaster unlike anything the world has ever experienced. Now, he has to clean up the mess. Ultimately, “Digger” is a wildly entertaining, wildly unpredictable satire of American power, and to go in blind is a necessity.
The tremendous supporting cast is a treasure trove of actors, including Riz Ahmed, Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and John Goodman, who all give heightened performances clearly inspired by the classic Kubrick film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964). Some, like Plemons, nail the tone perfectly, while others, like Hüller, stray a little too far into complete absurdity. Ahmed is particularly good as the jittery climate scientist Dr. Ganesh, and his scenes opposite Cruise are some of the best in the film.
Cruise is positively electric as Rockwell. Undergoing a drastic physical transformation for the role, he is caked in old-age makeup and clad in prosthetics, including a comically grotesque fat suit. The lengths to which the makeup team went to make Cruise a fat, old Texan billionaire is ironic given the real-life age gap between the actor and his character. Digger — somewhat unbelievably — is supposed to be in his mid-60s in the film. Cruise — perhaps more unbelievably — is 64. In addition to the heavy makeup, Digger speaks with a strong Texan accent, which adds a certain flair to many of his more volcanic scenes, including an extraordinary long take where he defends himself in front of a vast assembly of European governments. It’s not exactly the work one would expect from Cruise nowadays, as he has mostly stuck to franchise films following a streak of working with acclaimed auteurs such as Steven Spielberg (“Minority Report”), Paul Thomas Anderson (“Magnolia”) and the “Dr. Strangelove” director himself, Stanley Kubrick (“Eyes Wide Shut”).
Indeed, “Digger” is deeply indebted to “Dr. Strangelove,” in both its tone and its visual style. Iñárritu is a director famous for his extreme long takes, where the camera whizzes through claustrophobic sets and whip pans between actors’ faces instead of cutting to a new angle. While some of that frantic style is visible in “Digger,” the majority of the film is shot very differently from, say, “Birdman” (2014), which won Iñárritu Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki employs wide-angle lenses that capture the film’s lavish production design in gorgeous detail.
Much like Kubrick in “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), Iñárritu frames many shots in geometric compositions that complement the exaggerated opulence of the world Rockwell inhabits. But beyond the narrative-visual synchrony, it’s nice to see a big Hollywood release put so much effort into how it looks. For a film that cost Warner Bros. at least $160 million, the fact that Iñárritu was allowed to be so creative and profoundly unrealistic with “Digger” is nothing short of miraculous. We simply do not see films with budgets in the hundreds of millions look like this — and sadly, there’s a reason this is the case.
“Digger” is a strange movie. Its high-concept satire is far, far more bonkers than I am letting on. And while you don’t have to be a wine-sipping cinema expert to enjoy it, this film undeniably won’t work for many people. Just look at the box office projections: a nearly $8 million domestic opening projected against a budget of at least $160 million, before marketing expenses. Despite the Tom Cruise of it all, most people clearly didn’t think “Digger” looked like something worth seeing in theaters. (It absolutely is, by the way.) The critic reviews aren’t helping: The Rotten Tomatoes critic score is a meager 51% as of Oct. 5. The Metacritic score is an even more disastrous 46 out of 100.
Critics have complained that “Digger” is too preachy for its own good, without going deep enough into the issues it tackles. In fairness, the film’s surface-level environmentalist message is something you’ve heard before; the fact that the fossil fuel industry and late-stage capitalism are destroying the planet isn’t exactly mind-blowing news, after all. But that doesn’t make it any less true. “Digger” isn’t subtle about what it’s saying, either. It’s a proudly raucous satire, and practically every scene exists to make fun of someone, whether it be old white billionaires, old white presidents or old white military people. Whether or not the film’s ‘message’ works for the viewer is entirely subjective — each person has to decide for themself. Whether or not the movie works as a comedy is also up to the individual. Some people just won’t find this film funny. But the objective qualities of “Digger” — its careful compositions, great performances, sharp dialogue, gorgeous sets and unique, bubbly score — are there regardless of how you interpret the ‘message.’ The sheer artistic ambition on display makes “Digger” absolutely worth a trip to your local movie theater.
There’s a lot to be said about what “Digger” represents as a marker in the current cinematic landscape. Do its box office shortcomings cement it as the headstone of the traditional movie star? Is it proof that modern audiences don’t want to see bold artistic swings? Is it the swan song of the Hollywood ‘old guard’ (it being the last film Warner Bros. will ever release as an independent movie studio)? Whatever the case, we should be thankful to have received a film of such unabashed creativity. And who knows? “Digger” might just be the movie that gets you into movies.
